
Atom (text editor)

Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor for macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows with support for plug-ins written in JavaScript, and embedded Git Control, developed by GitHub. Atom is a desktop application built using web technologies. Most of the extending packages have free software licenses and are community-built and maintained. Atom is based on Electron (formerly known as Atom Shell), a framework that enables cross-platform desktop applications using Chromium and Node.js. Atom is written in CoffeeScript and Less, but much of it has been converted to JavaScript.
Atom was released from beta, as version 1.0, on 25 June 2015. Its developers call it a "hackable text editor for the 21st Century".
It is fully customizable in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Features.
Atom is a "hackable" text editor. This means it is customizable. There is an init script one can customize using CoffeeScript, a style sheet to customize the looks of Atom, and a keymap to map or re-map key combinations to commands. One can even make a package to wrap all of this functionality into a single package, written in their choice of CoffeeScript or JavaScript.
History.
Atom was developed by GitHub as a text editor. Facebook then developed the Nuclide and Atom IDE projects to turn Atom into an integrated development environment (IDE), but development stopped in December 2018.
Packages.
Like most other configurable text editors, Atom enables users to install third-party packages and themes to customize the features and looks of the editor. Packages can be installed, managed and published via Atom's package manager apm. Syntactic highlighting support for other languages than the default, can be installed through the packages, as well as the auto-complete function.
Programming language support.
Atom's default packages can apply syntax highlighting for multiple programming languages and file formats.
License.
Initially, extension packages for Atom and anything not part of Atom's core were released under an open-source license. On 6 May 2014, the rest of Atom, including the core application, its package manager, as well as its desktop framework Electron, were released as free and open-source software under the MIT License.
Privacy.
There was initially concern and discussion about two opt-out packages that report various data to external servers.
However, those packages are now opt-in with a verbose dialog at the initial launch: