There are a lot of text editors out there. Sublime Text, Atom, Brackets, Visual Studio Code and so many more. Atom is one of the best and it hands down my favorite!
Atom is an open source, platform independent text editor built by GitHub. It has an amazing ecosystem of packages which greatly extend its capabilities. Packages are super simple to install using the in-built atom package manager - apm. And did I mention that its free? Yes, its free!
Atom ships with a minimal set of packages. Here are a few packages that you must download to code like a pro:
Emmet:
Emmet is a plugin that should be installed, irrespective of the text editor/IDE you use. It makes writing HTML/CSS/SASS/LESS so much easier and faster. The syntax is pretty intuitive and very easy to catch on. Here’s the official Emmet cheat sheet. A must have package!Pigments:
I feel that managing CSS is a pain in the ass. Trying to visualize color codes just adds to that. Pigments displays the colors in your project files and give you a good idea of what’s its going to look like.Minimap:
Minimap displays a mini preview of your file on the right/left hand side of your editor. This one is ripped off from Sublime Text. Useful though!File Icons:
File Icons improves the visual appearance of your project. It assigns file icons to different types of files to improve visual appearance.Beautify:
This package beautifies the code that you have written. It corrects the indentation and the spacing. This package also supports multiple languages.Live Server:
For me, this is by far the most useful plugin for web development. It saves me from refreshing the browser 100 times to see the output. Again, a must have package!CSS Comb:
This package sorts the CSS properties in a CSS/SASS/LESS file. Pretty famous among clean coders!Merge Conflict:
This package resolves git merge conflicts through Atom. I wonder why GitHub didn’t ship this plugin with Atom in the first place.Linter:
A basic linter for your javascript files. There are many other linters available. Pick what you like the most.Activate Power Mode:
This is a fun one! Sometimes, only activating power mode can save you. This package was made for times like that. Activate power mode and code your problems away! :D
Atom has lots of other useful packages. It sucks though that its integration with Git is not that great. Weird right? Made by GitHub :-/ Lets hope that they decide to solve that issue in their next update.
Let me know which Atom packages you like the most!