First Beta of Atom 1.10 is now ready for public testing

Aug 1, 2016 21:45 GMT  ·  By

The Atom hackable text editor has just gotten a new stable build today, August 1, 2016, version 1.9, which brings you the latest goodies the development teams has implemented since the public beta release two months ago.

Yes, that's right, Atom 1.9 has been in development since June 6, 2016, when the stable Atom 1.8 release was announced, along with the first Beta of Atom 1.9. According to today's release notes, there are quite a few nice features added to Atom 1.9 since then, such as more speed improvements thanks to the implementation of Display Layers.

The new Display Layers functionality should also enable support for free-form folds via the "Fold Selection" command, as well as to improve the soft-wrapping algorithm. Atom 1.9 also comes with a brand new, intuitive way of letting users organize the workspace, thanks to the implementation of drag and drop layout management.

Other noteworthy features in the Atom 1.9 stable release are enhancements to the saving of files operation, which promises to minimize further the risk of losing your projects, the latest Electron 0.37.8 open-source framework from GitHub, as well as support for Cygwin and MSYS/MinGW Linux-like environments for the shell commands.

Atom 10 Beta now ready for public testing

Starting with the Atom 1.9.0 stable release, the project's development team informs all users about the removal of the GitRepositoryAsync experimental async API (Application Programming Interface) from the open-source software because their libgit2 library bindings were causing various crashes, as reported by many users since then.

"Unfortunately, our bindings to libgit2 were causing Atom’s helper processes to become unstable, leading to hard crashes. We apologize to any package authors who may have switched to these new APIs, but we’ve been forced to back out the async APIs. We’ll be trying again soon with a new approach for interacting with Git that’s more stable," said the devs.

You can download Atom 1.9 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now via our website. In the meantime, the Atom 1.10 Betas are already available for public testing, just in case you want an early taste of what's coming next to the hackable text editor. One of the biggest features of Atom 1.10 will be the upgrade of the Atom Package Manager (APM).