Atom is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

and

source code editor A source-code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment (IDE) or web browser. Source-code ed ...

for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

, and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

with support for plug-ins written in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, and embedded Git Control. Developed by

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

, Atom is a

desktop application A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

built using web technologies. Most of the extending packages have free software licenses and are community-built and maintained. It is based on the Electron framework, which was developed for that purpose, and hence was formerly called Atom Shell. Electron is a

framework A framework is a generic term commonly referring to an essential supporting structure which other things are built on top of. Framework may refer to: Computing * Application framework, used to implement the structure of an application for an op ...

that enables cross-platform desktop applications using

Chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hardne ...

and

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...

. Atom was initially written in

CoffeeScript CoffeeScript is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript. It adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python, and Haskell in an effort to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability. Specific additional features include list comprehensio ...

and

Less Less or LESS may refer to: fewer than,: not as much. Computing * less (Unix), a Unix utility program * Less (stylesheet language), a dynamic stylesheet language * Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), a product development framework that extends Scrum Othe ...

, but much of it has been converted to

. Atom was released from beta, as version 1.0, on June 25, 2015. Its developers call it a "hackable text editor for the 21st Century", as it is fully customizable in

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

, and

. On June 8, 2022, GitHub announced that Atom’s end-of-life will happen on December 15, "in order to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development", specifically its Github Codespaces and Microsoft's

Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor made by Microsoft with the Electron Framework, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code complet ...

Features

Atom is a "hackable" text editor, which means it is customizable. There is an init script one can customize using

, a style sheet to customize the looks of Atom, and a keymap to map or re-map

key combination computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

s to commands. One can even make a package to wrap all of this functionality into a single package, written in their choice of

History

Atom was (and is) developed by

as a text editor, and served as the basis for the Electron Framework.

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

then developed the Nuclide and Atom IDE projects to turn Atom into an

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

(IDE), but development on Nuclide and Atom IDE stopped in December 2018. On June 8, 2022,

announced the expected shutdown of Atom by scheduling archival of all development repositories of Atom by December 15, 2022. Atom's founder, Nathan Sobo, has announced that he's building the "spiritual successor" to Atom, titled Zed. Unlike Atom, Zed will be written in

Rust Rust is an iron oxide, a usually reddish-brown oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water or air moisture. Rust consists of hydrous iron(III) oxides (Fe2O3·nH2O) and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH ...

and will not be using the Electron framework.

Packages

Like most other configurable text editors, Atom enables users to install third-party packages and themes to customize the features and looks of the editor. Packages can be installed, managed and published via Atom's package manager apm. All types of packages, including but not limited to: Syntactic highlighting support for languages other than the default, debuggers, etc. can be installed via apm.

Programming language support

Atom's default packages can apply

syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms ...

for multiple programming languages and

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

License

Initially, extension packages for Atom and anything not part of Atom's core were released under an

open-source license An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial compa ...

. On May 6, 2014, the rest of Atom, including the core application, its package manager, as well as its desktop framework Electron, were released as

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

Privacy

There was initially concern and discussion about two opt-out packages that report various data to external servers. However, those packages are now opt-in with a verbose dialog at the initial launch: *Metrics package: Reports usage information to

Google Analytics Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. As o ...

(As of version 1.31.0, this has been removed, now usage information is sent to GitHub's analytics pipeline directly.), including a unique UUID v4 random identifier. According to the authors, this is to determine the performance and know the most-used functions. This feature can be disabled by the user by opening the Settings View, searching for the metrics package, and disabling it. *Exception-reporting package: Reports uncaught Atom exceptions to www.bugsnag.com.

References

External links

* {{JavaScript Formerly proprietary software Free text editors Free and open-source software Free integrated development environments GitHub HTML editors JavaScript-based HTML editors Linux text editors MacOS text editors Microsoft free software Software using the MIT license Text editors Unix text editors Windows text editors XML editors 2014 software Free HTML editors