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Atom

Score9.5 out of 10

90 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Atom?

Atom is a free and open source text editor offering a range of packages and themes.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Atom.
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Joyful coding

Incentivized
Flavio MauriView profile
CRM Designer in Marketing at Asda (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Atom for coding emails. I was having a weird problem with Dreamweaver (the licensed software my team uses) for which the program would lag, despite having the same machine as other members... so I picked Atom, which I knew was freely available and I had used in a previous job.
Atom works flawlessly, it's super lightweight, and has wonderful themes that are really pleasing to the eye compared to Dreamweaver or Visual Studio Code

Pros

  • Lightweight
  • Beautiful themes
  • Plugins
  • Customisable
  • Easily integrates with version control

Cons

  • remember window configuration (reopens always the same panels despite closing them)
  • remember code preferences (I use word wrap and i have to switch it on every document)

Return on Investment

  • The ROI is incredible, because the software is free and solid, so it's a no brainer to use
  • Speed: being light and with good shortcuts and find/replace functions, you can work fast
  • Side-by-side coding: there is a feature to scroll two documents at the same time, which would be great for code comparison, but it doesn't work well for me (one panel lags behind/falls out of sync very quickly)

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Notepad++

Other Software Used

Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe XD, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox

Atom is a Good looking free editor and scripting tool for developers

Incentivized
Laura GloverView profile
Information Designer in Professional Services at The Pixel Zoo (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • HTML, CSS, PHP and other code or text editing
  • Project collaboration with team and developers
  • Free and Open Source
  • Good looking interface
  • Colour coded syntax

Cons

  • High start-up time

Most Important Features

  • Real time previews
  • Git Hub integration
  • Colour coded syntax
  • Find and replace
  • Project collaboration / shared editing

Return on Investment

  • No negative ROI

Alternatives Considered

Sublime Text

Other Software Used

Trello, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), Divi, Discord

Atom - A simplest, finest , open-source text editor

Incentivized
Deepshi SharmaView profile
Software Engineer in Engineering at Kognoz Consulting (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Adding packages in preferable language
  • Formatting of code making it easy to read for all users
  • Support for GitHub and plugins and plugin development
  • It is able to handle large amounts of data without slowing down

Cons

  • There should be a better user tips manual page to learn keyboard shortcuts
  • It would also be beneficial if mathematical and data analytic tools were added
  • it has quite high start-up timing when you open large projects to work on it
  • Sometimes, atom closed suddenly and do not open again
  • It still lacks better options with the previews even though there are already some by users adding plugins
  • It doesn't have self-correct features for lint errors, unlike IntelliJ

Most Important Features

  • Support for Github, Plugins and Plugin development
  • Support for many languages
  • Support for many operating systems
  • UI is very good, has three column layout, syntax highlighting feature and much more
  • Fast coding with good error detection
  • It is moddable - hack your keymap / hotkeys / write scripts for your own actions and assign them the shortcuts

Return on Investment

  • ROI can be said as neutral because eventually, we have to switch to another text editor because of many limitations of Atom for large code.
  • In starting stage of the project, everything was fine and things were happening as expected
  • Overall it has been a great experience using Atom in my organization but many challenges were faced so that's something Atom should work on.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text and Vim

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, GitHub

Atom editor - multi-cursor mode for the win!

Incentivized
David McCannView profile
Director of Technology, Open Source Incubator Initiative in Engineering at Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) at the United Nations Foundation (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Atom has an amazing plugin library that is easy to use and integrates seamlessly.
  • Specifically, Atom's multi-cursor plug-in functionality provides a powerful method for manipulating text in bulk.
  • Atom provides good syntax highlighting and other interactive support for a number of programming languages through its available plug-ins.

Cons

  • Some of Atom's default UX could be improved. Depending on your previous workspace, it can open with two panes and a welcome tab in each, requiring you to close lots of cruft on startup.
  • Atom's documentation and plugin marketplace could be a little more discoverable.

Return on Investment

  • As mentioned before, Atom is highly effective for bulk text editing. This has proven useful when moving information quickly from one format to another (e.g., free-form word document into more structured formats like CSV).
  • Atom is only particularly useful in the hands of someone with a high degree of technology proficiency; as a result its impact has been limited at my organization due to varied levels of technical skill.
  • Atom has been useful for basic coding and scripting in Javascript (most recently, building an OpenStreetMap visualization).

Alternatives Considered

GNU Emacs and Eclipse

Other Software Used

Eclipse, Apache Tomcat

Highly Customizable IDE With Excellent Git Integration

Incentivized
Jonah DempcyView profile
Web & Mobile Developer in Engineering at Bluefire Productions (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Git integration
  • Plugin ecosystem
  • C++ development

Cons

  • Sometimes things do not work as expected. Atom has improved a lot over the last couple of years, but it still could use some polish.
  • Atom needs plugins for quality-of-life improvements. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows you to customize Atom to suit your needs.
  • It would be nice if Atom had some recommended starter packages that come with popular plugins for highlighting, soft-wrapping and so on.
  • There are some plugins that could be turned into core Atom features, like Linter and Beautify.

Return on Investment

  • Atom has made writing C++ code more enjoyable.
  • Atom has taken a decent amount of time to configure with plugins, but in my opinion, it was worth it.
  • Atom has helped us reach our business objectives of writing quality C++ code and working on the JNI layer for Android apps which have a native code component.

Alternatives Considered

Eclipse, Sublime Text, Visual Studio IDE and NetBeans

Other Software Used

GitHub, Eclipse, Sublime Text