Atom IDE Announcement

Taking a quick look at the Atom IDE announcement.

On Sept 12th Atom announced its addition of IDE features in this blog post.

Summary

It appears that the reason for this big push is to get as many IDEs on board to using LSP (language server protocol) as possible and that this is where the Atom “IDE” movement started. If you visit the homepage for LSP you will find that it is an open source movement for working with your favorite languages, which will hopefully provide a more consistent experience across IDEs when developing. In fact, atom isn’t the only IDE listed. You will find other popular names like: VSCode and Sublime Text 3.

GitHub

I saw surprising little about the improvements that GitHub made to Atom in the announcement blog post (maybe because it isn’t new) but I encourage all developers to check out the Git/GitHub integration into Atom. You can manage your repository from with Atom by seeing the staged and unstaged changes, viewing the changes and specifying hunks to stage, committing, and last but not least pushing your code up to GitHub (all while never leaving the UI). Great work here GitHub.

Digging In

After I went to this page to download the beta version I started installing the IDE features by typing this command:

apm i atom-ide-ui

Then I attempted to install the php language support using this command

apm i ide-php

but found that my original version of atom conflicts with the package as it only works with the beta version. So I then installed the php package the recommended way (through the Beta UI).

I immediately got a message about the linter package not being compatible so I disabled that in favor of the new diagnostics package for testing purposes.

I was very excited about some of the new features that atom IDE promised like:

Autocomplete - Doesn’t seem to be working for me

Diagnostics - I had to get rid of the linter package for this, it seems to work for php but what about my other languages?

Find all references - Seems to be working as expected

Go to definition - If you are using an object oriented (OO) framework this seems like a huge win

Hover - This seems to be a win for OO frameworks

Outline View - My favorite feature

Reference highlighting - I couldn’t seem to get this working

Based on what I encountered I will most likely disable the diagnostics package and reenable the linter package because of my desired languages support. My favorite feature that was added was the Outline View as I have found myself missing this feature from IDEs. I expect in the future as my work in OO languages increases I will be able to use other features such as “Go to definition”.

Conclusion

Overall, I like the direction that atom is heading and I look forward to the support from some of the large companies heading up this movement.