14 DAY TRIAL // GitHub's Andrea Liliana Griffiths is pleased to announce the release of Atom 1.16 as the latest stable version of the popular, multi-platform, and open-source hackable text editor, along with the Beta of Atom 1.17.
Atom 1.16 has entered Beta a little over a month ago when Atom 1.15 launched with its improvements to duplicate selections with multiple lines, the ability to retain tabs of deleted files, always visible cursors, better handling of minified files, and several other optimizations and bug fixes.
While not on the same caliber as the previous release, Atom 1.16 is here with improvements mostly for macOS users by adding an extra layer of title bar options, which can be enabled from Settings -> Core Settings -> Title Bar. Two new options are available, namely custom-inset and hidden.
"custom-inset adds a bit more padding around the 'traffic lights'. This might not seem that useful at first glance, but the 'traffic lights' will look more aligned when combined with something that needs more height. For example when the title bar gets replaced with a tool bar," reads the release announcement.
Atom 1.17 to introduce Docks, offer faster startup times
Atom 1.16 also appears to render only visible DOM nodes, which promises to improve the performance of displaying project search results. As usual, the full release notes should give you an insight into all the bug fixes and small changes implemented in this maintenance release.
As for Atom 1.17, which entered Beta, it looks like it will be a feature-rich update introducing Docks, an extension of the pane system engineered to accommodate interface elements, which users can than quickly toggle into and out of the view. A screenshot is attached below to see it in action and understand how it works.
Additionally, Atom 1.17 promises faster startup times of windows by using V8 custom startup snapshots, and completely removes jQuery as a dependency of Atom’s bundled packages, thus improving performance even more. You can download both Atom 1.16 and Atom 1.17 Beta for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.
