Atom - beautiful, functional, customizable. What more could you want?
December 15, 2018
Atom - beautiful, functional, customizable. What more could you want?
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Atom
Atom is my IDE of choice for any web development work I assist with. It is not used department-wide-- solely within the IT section of our company. Atom provides a clean, highly configurable, highly organized, and highly functional environment for coding in all languages--though my experience with it consists only of Javascript, HTML, and CSS.
- Automatic syntax coloring and formatting. Code is so, so much easier to read and write when related keywords are automatically color-coordinated and indentation happens automatically.
- Community-driven plugins. Because Atom is open-source, anyone can write a plugin to add functionality and features to the software--this means, as a user, you have hundreds of valuable tools at your fingertips, for free.
- Aesthetics. As long as you're staring at your computer for 8+ hours per day, you may as well be looking at something aesthetically pleasing, right? Not only is Atom's interface clean and well-polished, you can download custom themes, shift between light/dark mode, and so much more. Having control over the look and feel of your IDE makes long hours of coding so much more enjoyable.
- The tabs that automatically open upon launching the app can be a little cluttered and annoying--they can almost certainly be toggled off in Settings, but their default behavior is slightly irksome.
- Atom increases efficiency over many other more basic text editors, as it provides file structure management right in the app. Navigating Finder/File Explorer is totally unnecessary when all your project's files are available from Atom's sidebar whenever you need them. Atom has increased my personal efficiency substantially.
- Atom makes collaboration insanely easy--no more texts/Slack messages back and forth recommending changes while juggling Github branches and commits. Being able to code together LIVE remotely is so much more efficient and clean.
I've tried other basic text editors like TextWrangler, etc., as well as briefly overviewed software like Sublime text. My preference of Atom over Sublime may mostly come down to personal taste--I don't have a robust enough knowledge of Sublime to be sure how their features actually stack up. Certainly I have felt no deficits in functionality, features, or user-friendliness while using Atom.