GitHub Atom review

SoftwareIDE

GitHub Atom review

“A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”

https://atom.io/

Disclaimer

I came to Atom with a prejudice…
The long closed-source / beta period, the fact the “hackable” editor isn’t coded in JavaScript but in CoffeeScript, the need to add plugins for everything (according to some reviews), the reported slowness and memory hungriness, made me to hesitate to try it… I was also a happy user of Adobe Brackets, with no compelling need to change.
But, Brackets accumulated a number of little annoyances, making me to try other editors.
The test of Visual Studio Code was brief, as it didn’t have the base (semi-advanced if you want) features I use all the time: drag’n’drop of code, and column selection.
So I tested Atom, with a critical eye. Spoiler: I was seduced, and it becomes my favorite Web IDE…

Quick review

I downloaded the installer. It is big! Of the IDEs I tried, it is among the biggest:

Name Version Size
Brackets 1.5 37 MB
Visual Studio Code 0.10.3 43 MB
Light Table 0.7.2 48 MB
Atom 1.3.1 88 MB
WebStorm 9 140MB

I installed Atom (v. 1.3.1 on Windows 7 with 8 GB of memory).
It doesn’t ask where to install, it goes arbitrarily at C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\atom. I would prefer to install it beside my other programs, to locale it easily. And I would appreciate it asks me before installing something on the desktop (I have no icons there!) or on the start menu (I no longer care about this one, but still…).
It is a bit “all over the place”, as it also has a C:\Users<user name>C:\Users\plhoste.atom\AppData\Roaming\Atom folder (for cache?), and a C:\Users<user name>.atom folder (settings, packages…).

I opened it, it starts quickly (at least as second load, after the initial one after install).
It has a dark UI, which I don’t like, but I quickly found where to change this to the default light theme. Good point than several themes are bundled by default: no need to hunt for them. The default light UI theme is rather nice. I also chose the One Light syntax theme among four. A bit too pale (low contrast) for my taste, I will eventually see if I can tweak it.

As I feared (I searched a bit before, given the Visual Studio Code deception), drag’n’drop of code isn’t available out of the box. Actually, I saw several plugins activating it. That’s one of the problems with this editor: there is a plethora of plugins, which can be nice, but it is confusing to choose one… And I still think such feature should be built-in in the editor.
Same for column (rectangular) selections! Later, I found out Atom supports out of the box column selection (Alt+Up / Down, extend only, allows rectangular selection with Shift+Left / Right) and multiple carets (Ctrl+click).
I find a bit unsettling to have to install lot of plugins to get base editor features. I have the same issue with Brackets, but it has at least these two features built-in (but D’n’D must be activated by a setting).
That said, I found several features out of the box for which I had to install a plugin in Brackets:

  • Jump to matching brace (bracket / parenthesis);
  • Gutter selection of lines;
  • Show whitespace / end of lines / indentation guides / right margin;
  • Selection to upper / lower case; and some more.
  • Change text in selection only; regular expressions for searching; limit searches to word only (something I rarely use but which is sometime useful).

Two features I mentioned in the mentioned article are also missing from Atom:

  • Auto-fill of search field with text under caret (text has to be selected; Ctrl+D selects the current word, but I assign it to duplicate line instead; at least, it memorizes the last search);
  • Recall previous searches / replacements (something that SciTE (my all-purpose lightweight text editor of choice) does, which I find convenient);

OK, I switched to Atom to type this text (in Markdown format). Good surprise: it has spell checking enabled out of the box. And it can suggest words, although I am not sure of the logic of suggestions (scanning existing buffers, apparently; nice point: it is not obtrusive). Little bug (or unwanted feature ;-) – I see a misspelled word in the text (red underline), I right-click directly on it, and choose Correct spelling. It does nothing… I found out I have to left-click first on the word to get spelling suggestions.
I see no way to add words to a user dictionary (there is an issue for that, and for other language dictionaries).

The Welcome Guide is nice, I just saw a way to customize the styling. Although it lacks concrete examples: eg. how do I change the color of titles in Markdown? (I avoid reddish colors, reserved to mark errors). Ah, I suppose I have to study an existing style, like https://github.com/atom/atom-light-syntax/blob/master/index.less
And I can see the actual styles by showing the developer tools (View > Developer > Toggle Developer Tools) and using it like Chrome DevTools.
Also a bug: I have Choose a Theme and Customize the Styling opened, I can’t scroll back above Install a Package. I have to close one to see the top!

Another bug or unwanted feature: it ensures there is an empty line at the end of a file when saving it, which can be nice (I generally want that), but if I have several lines, it removes the extra ones (which is annoying in a text file, because I want to keep my future paragraph empty lines). Will see if I can disable that.

Undo coalescing is a bit strange: when I type a word, then undo, it removes parts of the word, successively, instead of whole word.

Atom lacks a nice feature of Brackets: in an HTML file, Brackets can auto-complete the path of a resource (script, CSS file, etc.). Found a plugin for that, of course… Although it is slightly less convenient.

Annoyance: I can hit Ctrl+F in the Settings > Package page (for example), but it doesn’t find anything there (can be convenient to find a given package by something else than its name).

Command palette: good idea to highlight searched terms, but on light theme, I get light gray highlight, nearly unreadable on very light gray background…

Minor quibble: title and closing cross in inactive tabs are one or two pixels too low (one pixel lower than the active tab, at least). It “hurts” my sense of tidiness… :-)

Installed packages

Good point: once a plugin / package is installed, no need to restart Atom to get it working.

Themes