I have recently switched from Sublime Text 3 to using Atom & I have fallen in love with it. Atom is a hackable text editor made by GitHub which has many advantages and is free to use.
Now, I know that there are some drawbacks of using Atom (one of it being laggy/sluggish with files having more than 1000lines of code approx) over sublime but that’s a topic for another discussion.
There are many preinstalled or core packages but to make the most out of Atom you need to install community packages.
There are 2 ways to install any package in atom
- Click on the “+ Install” side tab from settings page
- from the command line using apm (preferred).
apm install <package_name>
Here are top most useful atom packages, IMO. The list is in no particular order of preference but I will be mentioning only those which I use on a day to day basis.
project-manager
This package lets you switch between projects in a breeze. It saves all the opened files/tabs and even the cursor position (:O). Create a new project and save it in project-manager using cmd + shift + P. cmd + control + P gives a drop down list to quickly toggle between saved projects.
There were a time when I was working on multiple projects in a single day and this package helped me save lot of time. If you also enjoy using this, buy the dev a beer. :P
atom-bootstrap3
If your project involves Bootstrap 3 you should check this package. This package supports snippets and autocompletion and also supports Glyphicons and Fontawesome.
git-plus
Now, I don’t mind doing git things in terminal. But it helps to not toggle back & forth between atom and terminal. Saves time. With simple shortcuts you can check status, add, commit & push or do all of these steps at once. SUPER!
Next atom update might have these features inbuilt. check out the atom article
clipboard-plus
emmet
If you’re a Web developer and you work with html and CSS, this package needs no introduction. If you’ve never used emmet before this should be the first package you install.
autocomplete-paths
Again, saves a lot of time while including images, files, etc.
minimap
pigments & color-picker
delete-whitelines
I’ve used trimmer a lot on sublime text to get rid of empty lines in my markup. I couldn’t find a package to do this in atom so I made one.
file-icons
sync-settings
Synchronize all your settings and packages across atom instances
gist
Are you using Atom? did I miss out on your favorite package?