10 Essential Plugins for Atom Editor
At Nukomeet, most of us use Atom, a hackable text editor
for the 21st century. Although with occasional performance hiccups, it provides an easy to use and complete solution for software development.
If you haven’t heard about Atom, be sure to check the following video introduction.
Atom is rapidly improving every day thanks to vibrant community and the rich plugin ecosystem. It this article we will present 10 plugins we use regularly together with Atom.
1. Advanced Open File
Advanced Open File (by Michael Kelly) helps to rapidly open or create files and folders without the need to use the mouse or touchpad. Simply hit Cmd-Alt-O (macOS) or Ctrl-Alt-O (Linux, Windows, etc) to open the file list window. Use tab for autocompletion.
2. PlatformIO IDE Terminal
PlatformIO IDE Terminal (originally created by Jeremy Ebneyamin of terminal-plus) adds the terminal window directly to Atom editor. It reuses your system’s default initialization files to precisely mimic the shell from a regular terminal. The terminal plugin is also fully customizable with themes.
3. Minimap
Minimap generates the source code preview on the side. It helps to navigate quickly, especially within longer files. It also comes with several (sub) plugins to further customize the minimap experience, e.g. minimap-cursorline to display the current line with the cursor, or minimap-git-diff to highlight git’s additions and/or deletions; go here for the full list of available minimap plugins
4. File Icons
File Icons (based on sommerper/filetype-color, new API by John Gardner) adds a comprehensive list of file specific icons so it’s easier and quicker distinguish them at the glance.
5. Beautify
Beautify (by Glavin Wiechert) is Atom’s universal text formatter supporting HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, C, C++, C#, Objective-C, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Coldfusion, SQL and more. It can be either run manually using Beautify Editor function (via Command Palette or triggered by Ctrl-Alt-B), or you can configure it to run the formatting process on save.
6. Emmet
Emmet is a universal plugin (it works with many popular text editors) to write HTML and CSS in a more efficient way thanks to intelligent textual expansions.
7. Script
Script (by Kyle Kelley) is a simple plugin to run the code from the current file as a whole, or via a selection. It supports plenty of different languages out of the box.
8. Jumpy
Jumpy (by David L. Goldberg) is a plugin which helps to quickly move the cursor around on the screen by creating dynamic hotkeys to jump to specific location of the visible file area.
9. Tern
Tern is a stand-alone code-analysis engine (created by Marijn Haverbeke, the author and maintainer of Eloquent JavaScript and CodeMirror) to improve JavaScript programmers’ productivity. It provides autocompletion, function argument hints, jump-to-definition, and various automatic refactoring operations. Here’s Atom’s integration with Tern.
10. Pigments
Pigments (by Cédric Néhémie) is a simple plugin which scans source files in your project directories looking for colors and will build a palette with all of them. It supports most of the color transformations functions and expressions of the three biggest CSS pre-processors out there (LESS, Sass & Stylus).
Bonus: Activate Power Mode
Activate Power Mode (by Joel Besada) helps you write your code in style!!.
Feel free to let us know your favorite Atom plugins in the comments below or catch us on Twitter.
