Trying out Atom editor

Posted on May 13, 2014

I work daily with an editor and I’ve already shared with you guys my love for Sublime Text. This doesn’t mean I do not try and get interested in other editors. I actually follow and contribute (ok - only once so far) to the Brackets editor which I found very interesting but at the end not entirely covering my use cases/workflow.

Recently Github released their own editor - Atom. I wanted to test it out, but at the moment there are only Mac builds.

Installation

Option 1: Install from PPA

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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/atom
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install atom

Option 2: Build latest version of Atom

These are the requirements to be able to build:

OS with 64-bit architecture
node.js v0.10.x
npm v1.4.x
libgnome-keyring-dev sudo apt-get install libgnome-keyring-dev
sudo npm config set python /usr/bin/python2 -g to ensure that gyp uses Python 2

And to build this is these would be the commands to type:

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git clone https://github.com/atom/atom
cd atom
script/build # Creates application at /tmp/atom-build/Atom
sudo script/grunt install # Installs command to /usr/local/bin/atom
script/grunt mkdeb # Generates a .deb package at /tmp/atom-build

Playing around

Now it’s time to play around - create own package / find a bug to dig a bit into the code and or contribute in the Atom community guide, Splitting Atoms.