A text editor is an important tool for developers, since they spend a lot of time using one. This article is about Atom, a cool modern editor.
Atom is a free and open source text editor developed in 2015 by Github. Its developer calls it “the hackable text-editor for the 21st century.” It offers vast language support, and easy customization. It also works as an integrated development environment, or IDE. It comes with some built-in packages, but you can install other packages too. Most of these are freely licensed and maintained by community. Of course, it’s also free of cost.
Installing Atom on Fedora
Go to the Atom homepage from your web browser and click to download the RPM version. You can also download the
file directly from the releases page. Then install it using this command:
sudo dnf install ./atom.x86_64.rpm
To launch, run this command at the terminal:
atom
After installing
Once you launch, you’ll see the screen below.
You’re now ready to go. One of the most important commands to remember is Ctrl+Shift+P, which opens the Command Palette.
Use the Palette to search through various available commands.
Installing packages
The editor comes with a large number of packages that add functionality. To install any package, follow these steps:
- Press Ctrl and click on Install.
- Type the name of package to install.
- Hit Install to install the package.
Here is a preview of the installation:
Here are some packages you might find useful to start with:
- Minimap
- Beautify
- Git Plus
- Color Picker
- File Icons
Themes
The Settings view allows you to change the theme to suit your preferences. The default installation comes with four UI themes and eight syntax themes. To modify your theme or install new themes, click the Themes tab on the Settings view.
Once you customize the editor to suit your needs, enjoy this cool, modern development tool!
Image courtesy of Giorgio Galeotti — originally uploaded to Flickr as Atomium.
Jullian Knocke
Then atom is installed but will never be updated. There is a copr that has keep atom to a reasonable recent version https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/mosquito/atom/
Antonio
Trying to install on Fedora 23, atom.x86_64.rpm is not recognizable as a rpm package. Could not install it. Please tell me how to fix that. Thank you.
Paul W. Frields
@Antonio: This means you have an incomplete or corrupted download. The one available at Github is an RPM package and works fine.
frantisekz
Why you didn’t mention that users have to update their Atom installation manually? Or this can be used: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/mosquito/atom/
pedro andrade
Simple tutorial for a very rich app.
Hopefully in the future, atom will be on the rpm-repos.
regards and keep those posts coming. (:
Pavlo Rudyi
Atom also available in Copr: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/mosquito/atom/
Cory Hilliard
Since this is hackable, is there any talk about making this load faster? I end up using Scite for most of my code reviews because it loads instantly, instead of the 10 seconds it takes to load Atom. I know it’s only 10 seconds, but that seems like an eternity.
Pavlo Rudyi
~3s on i3-2330M & Samsung 750 Evo SSD.
DokterW
I made a script to install and update Atom: https://github.com/DokterW/SHatomATOR
Jim G
I like Atom, but updating it on Fedora was a pain and since they release an update almost everyday, it wasn’t worth it for me.
bo32
On my side, I used Fedy to install it.
Thanks for the packages, they seem to be very useful!
Yago
I got this:
alias atom-update=”sudo rpm -i -U -v –hash https://atom.io/download/rpm“
Ivan Augusto
Thanks for git-plus package, it’s really much useful! ?
Anupama Mandal
🙂
Allen Halsey
I’ve have good experience with the helber and mosquito copr repos:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/helber/atom/
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/mosquito/atom
Hopefully, it can be an official Fedora package soon:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1132661
GM
http://fazlearefin.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/installingupdating-atom-editor-fedora.html
The script will install Atom or update your existing atom installation. Atom plugins will also get updated.
major_tom
i testet atom a while ago but i will stay with gedit wich pleasures me more – would be good if it gets more feature enhanced (but its allready very good)
Andrea
Among these hipster editors, sublime is still the best one by far.
Mike
What about updating? At least the copr repo updates… regardless of its “legality”
Shnoulle
Why a question about copr repo ‘legality’ ? Clearly lawful here : https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/LICENSE.md .
Else, doing some tes t, but I stay on currently geany .
Kevin Kofler
Atom bundles Electron, which bundles Chromium. Chromium contains code under the LGPL. That code cannot be redistributed without source code. But the “RPM” in Copr is not built from the actual source code, nor does it even include the source code in the SRPM at all, it just repackages the binary. Therefore, it is distributed in violation of the LGPL license.
Upstreams who bundle Electron’s libchromiumcontent as binary-only are similarly in violation of the LGPL.
Scott Palmer
Do the official packages have the USE GDK3 compile time option yet?
Oscar
Thanks, the best of post for me is the small list of packages 🙂