April 13, 2017
Atom has become my go-to text editor
A little over a year ago I wrote a post comparing text editors, so I thought I'd take some time to reflect back on those, as well as a new ones I've started using. Atom is becoming my favorite text editor and I'm relying on it for almost everything lately.
I spend a lot of time using text editors. I like to try out new ones every so often. I feel like if you work in code it's good to try out new tools. For a long time, Notepad ++ was my go to editor. When others argued the benefits of using Dreamweaver as an IDE, I found myself more drawn to the independence of open-source Notepad ++ (plus any old FTP client). Then I discovered that there had been an emergence in a lot of new text editor options. I still love Notepad++ and give it credit for providing a great tool that inspired others. I have found a few new tools that I think are pretty great.
For a while I was using Brackets, an open-source Adobe product. Brackets really is a great editor that has some awesome features designed specifically for web designers/developers. I really like Brackets and I'll probably keep using it for some time. There are some really great features in Brackets. I like that it offers some features that were nice about Dreamweaver, such as auto tag closing, and the image preview when you hover over an image file path. It also provides a live preview of your edits via Google Chrome. But even on my pretty fast work computer Brackets can be a little slow to load, but overall much faster than Dreamweaver or any other Adobe product, just nowhere near as quick as Notepad++, Sublime or VS Code.
My current editor preference is the Atom editor, from the GitHub community. Like Brackets, it's also free and open-source, and it's also cross platform. I find it to have a great set of options and is pretty easy to customize to your needs. This video has some great tips for setting up Atom.
Here are some of the reasons I have grown to love Atom:
- At first I was really missing the self-closing tag feature of Brackets, but I've found the Atom alternative of using the shift key to pull up a dialoge box when beginning a tag to be more than equal as an alternative. You can also quickly close any tag by keying 'Ctrl+Alt+.'
- The customization of Atom is so easy, and so thoughtful. I really like the line that designates where code will end, and the lines you can have to designate tabs, and the ability to let the page scroll below the last line. Little features like these make the editor very comfortable to use.
- Search and replace works great: the 'Ctrl+F' function of Notepad++ allows me to easy find and replace multi-lines of text and for a while I thought that function was absent in Atom. It is in fact built into Atom, however the command is 'Ctrl+E.' 'Ctrl+F' still works, however it is single line find and replace only. No problem, but because 'Ctrl+E' works perfectly.
Recently I discovered another option for text editors, Miscrosoft's Visual Studio Code. VS Code is also open source, and out of the box has a lot of nice features. I also find it to be pretty fast to load compared to other editors, because of this VS Code has become my go-to editor for quick code edits, and I really rely on Atom for most projects where I'm spending any length of time. With Atom, if you take advantage of the available extensions (like the minimap, and the pigments color previewer) and customization options, you have one excellent editor.
Quite a few, probably most, front end web developers swear by Sublime Text. Sublime may not be free, but it is very affordable at just $70 for a lifetime license. A lifetime license will let you use the app on unlimited machines and operating systems. I've tried it, and I like it, but my attraction for open-source products keeps me going back to Atom, Brackets, and VS Code. I suggest that designers/developers try out all the editors they can. It's nice to have options!
Labels: code, Front-end Development, Graphic/web design, technology, text-editors, web development
