The new feature will be implemented in Atom 1.21

Sep 23, 2017 07:34 GMT  ·  By

GitHub and Facebook recently launched a set of tools that promise to allow you to transform your Atom hackable text editor into a veritable IDE (Integrated Development Environment). They call the project Atom-IDE.

With the release of Atom 1.21 Beta last week, GitHub introduced Language Server Protocol support to integrate its brand-new Atom-IDE project, which comes with built-in support for five popular language servers, including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Java, C#, and Flow. But many others will come with future Atom updates.

"Each of the IDE packages expose a selection of functionality that is dependent on the underlying language server and is activated when you open files it supports," explained GitHub's Damien Guard. "You’ll need to install at least two packages - the user interface for Atom IDE and a package that support the language."

Getting started with Atom as an IDE or Atom-IDE

If you want to rely on your Atom hackable text editor for IDE capabilities, it's now very easy to get started thanks to Atom-IDE. All you have to do is to open the Install Packages dialog from the Settings view in Atom, where you need to search for and install the atom-ide-ui package.

This will implement the IDE UI in your Atom instance, but to have a fully working IDE you'll also have to install the IDE language support of your choice. For now, you can choose between ide-typescript (TypeScript & JavaScript), ide-php (PHP), ide-java (Java), ide-csharp (C#), as well as ide-flowtype (Flow).

You can download Atom 1.21 Beta right now via our website, where you'll also find the stable release, Atom 1.20, which introduces more Git integration improvements, such as multiple simultaneous diff views and pending pane support, and the ability to optionally display context lines in Find in Project results.

Additionally, Atom 1.20 introduces support for PostCSS in its CSS autocomplete functionality, support for embedding code in strings via bracket-matcher, an API for inspecting dock's visibility, as well as better PHP grammar support in the language-php package. Atom 1.21 launches next month with new API to watch the file system for changes.

Git integration improvements

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Atom-IDE
Git integration improvementsFind and Replace context lines now optional
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