Summary

Notes on customizing the Atom text editor.

Packages

The Atom community provides extensions as packages. This command installs some packages that are generally useful:

apm install color-picker file-icons

The file-icons package requires no configuration. Refer to the page for color-picker for details on how to use it.

Install code linters for the languages that you use. Atom automatically runs the appropriate linter for the files that you are editing.

Packages for Web Development

This command installs support for CSS (using CSSLint) and JavaScript (using ESLint):

apm install linter-csslint linter-eslint linter-js-yaml

Packages for Go Development

Run this command to add the go-plus package, which turns Atom into a development environment for Go:

apm install go-plus

The next time that you open Atom, you will see go-plus automatically download and configure all of the tools that it needs. go-plus will ask you to restart Atom once for the changes to take effect.

Packages for Ruby Development

If you are a Ruby on Rails developer, use this command to install support for CoffeeLint, Rubocop, and YAML (using yaml-js):

apm install linter-coffeelint linter-rubocop linter-js-yaml

The EDITOR Environment Variable

Remember to set the EDITOR environment variable in your ~/.bash_profile file, so that this editor is automatically invoked by command-line tools like your version control system.

To make Atom your default editor, use this line:

export EDITOR="atom -w"