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Atom editor - multi-cursor mode for the win!
Updated November 23, 2020

Atom editor - multi-cursor mode for the win!

David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Atom

I am the only user of Atom at my organization, but it was the editor of choice at my previous job. It is used for quick-and-dirty text manipulation, as well as for C# and Javascript coding.
  • Atom has an amazing plugin library that is easy to use and integrates seamlessly.
  • Specifically, Atom's multi-cursor plug-in functionality provides a powerful method for manipulating text in bulk.
  • Atom provides good syntax highlighting and other interactive support for a number of programming languages through its available plug-ins.
  • Some of Atom's default UX could be improved. Depending on your previous workspace, it can open with two panes and a welcome tab in each, requiring you to close lots of cruft on startup.
  • Atom's documentation and plugin marketplace could be a little more discoverable.
  • As mentioned before, Atom is highly effective for bulk text editing. This has proven useful when moving information quickly from one format to another (e.g., free-form word document into more structured formats like CSV).
  • Atom is only particularly useful in the hands of someone with a high degree of technology proficiency; as a result its impact has been limited at my organization due to varied levels of technical skill.
  • Atom has been useful for basic coding and scripting in Javascript (most recently, building an OpenStreetMap visualization).
Not listed is Vim, which is another free-form editor that is in the same product category. Vim and Emacs are both supported on more platforms and with lower systems requirements and similar versatility, but don't offer the ease of use (both being primarily keyboard-only applications).

Eclipse on the other hand is a much more heavyweight, resource-intensive app, geared more towards the true IDE set of requirements and use cases.
Atom is great as a general-purpose text editor, and is especially powerful for bulk text editing, and scripting languages where a more heavy-weight IDE isn't as appropriate (e.g. Javascript, Coffeescript, Ruby, Python, etc.)