Atom is a free and open-source text editor by GitHub, that aims to be a "Hackable text editor for the 21st century". It includes features such as syntax highlighting (which is available for a wide range of different programming/markup languages), spell-check, autofill, etc.
Atom is a free and open-source text editor, licensed under the MIT license, that is developed by GitHub. Its first stable release (1.0) was on the 25th of June 2015, although preview releases had been available for some time before then. Its installation is usually simple, but it requires a recent release of Node.js which can make things more complicated. It is available from the webupd8team PPA, although installing from source and from 64-bit deb packages provided on their website are also viable options.
Installation
Installing Atom can be done via three major methods, on Ubuntu. The first, which is only possible on 64-bit systems, is to download the deb package provided on their website and then install it either via the Ubuntu Software Center or by running:
sudo dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb
from the command line. This installation will need to be manually updated every time a new release becomes available. That is, one will need to download the deb package from this website, again, and re-run the above command to update the existing installation.
Secondly, Atom may be installed from the webupd8team PPA, which can be performed by running:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/atom
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install atom
This installation will be automatically updated every time a new release becomes available and one runs the software updater.
Thirdly, Atom may be installed from source. This method is usually the most time-consuming (easily taking over an hour, but most of this will be automated, requiring no user input) and liable to errors. Firstly, one must get the dependencies, by running:
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_0.12 | sudo bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
then get the source code:
git clone https://github.com/atom/atom
cd atom
git fetch -p
git checkout $(git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`)
script/build
sudo script/grunt install
This installation will not self-update, hence this must be done manually. To update a source installation manually, run (from the atom source directory):
git remote add upstream https://github.com/atom/atom.git
git fetch -p
git checkout $(git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`)
script/build
sudo script/grunt install
the first of these lines can be omitted after you update the first time.
