4 Essential Packages for Atom
I switched over to Github’s Atom editor from Sublime Text a few months ago, and so far I haven’t looked back. Sometimes it starts up a little slow on Windows, but the open-source support is fantastic, with a huge selection of packages already. Here are a few of my favorites.
Markdown-Writer
If you’re using Atom & Jekyll, markdown-writer should be a no-brainer.
- Easy options for drafting and publishing posts.
- Commands for images and links.
- Other formatting shortcuts.
With markdown-writer, atom feels like it plugs directly into Jekyll’s process, and it’s just a pleasure to use.
Project-Manager
I used a similar package with Sublime Text, and it’s invaluable when you’re working on multiple projects at the same time. Save your environment with your tree view and open tabs/frames, switch to something else, then open it back up right where you left off whenever you’re ready.
Sync-Settings
When you’re working in more than one environment, it can be a pain to get Atom’s settings configured the way you want in both locations. Sync-settings takes care of everything for you with one command. Backup sends a list of configurations to a gist saved in your Github account, and Restore pulls from that same gist to restore your settings.
It takes care of all the following:
- Sync Atom’s and package settings
- Sync installed packages
- Sync user keymaps
- Sync user styles
- Sync user init script
- Sync snippets
- Sync user defined text files
Atom Material UI Theme
Google’s Material Design Guidelines are beautiful and clean, and this theme for Atom follows those guidelines closely, resulting in a really nice editor. Honestly, I started using this theme when I first installed Atom and haven’t tried out anything else for more than a few minutes.
Those are some of my favorite Atom packages so far, but I’m sure there’s plenty of useful ones I haven’t run across yet. For anyone else using Atom - which packages can you not live without?