GitHub has made Atom, its open source text editor, available for all. Find out why that's got web designers excited.
Launched in 2008, GitHub has become the code storage and development site of choice worldwide, and so any new tool it releases is going to cause a big stir.
That's certainly been the case with Atom. Dubbed "a hackable text editor for the 21st Century", it's designed to be simple to use out of the box, but also easily expandable using any of 800 packages.
Since launching in invite-only private beta earlier this year, it's been downloaded over 250,000 times, and is already one of the best code editors around. And now GitHub has made it fully open source and available to the public to download for free.
Features
There are lots of great features out of the box
Like other desktop apps, Atom has its own icon in the dock, native menus and dialogs, and full access to the file system. Out of the box it includes:
A file system browser
A fuzzy finder for quickly opening files
Fast project-wide search and replace
Multiple cursors and selections
Multiple panes
Snippets
Code folding
A clean preferences UI
Import TextMate grammars and themes
Customisation
The web-based core makes it easy to extend and customise
But what web designers and developers will love most about Atom is the way its web-based core means it's easy to customise using HTML5, CSS or JavaScript.
It's composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core, so if you don't like some part of it you can replace it with your own package, then upload it to the central repository at atom.io so everyone else can use it too..
Atom is currently only available for Mac users (OS 10.8 or later), although Windows and Linux versions are promised soon. We'd love to hear how you get on with it - let us know in the comments below!
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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
