Atom: an editor for digital humanists?

This summer, github’s Atom, “a hackable text editor for the 21st century,” went public with an official 1.0 release. New text editors are the kind of thing I don’t get excited about — there are plenty of good ones out there already to choose from — but Atom is different.

I won’t try to summarize in a short blog post all the really well thought out and nicely implemented things that immediately make it pleasant to start working in Atom. Instead, here is a small selection of highlights that I think would be difficult or impossible to find together in another editor, and collectively make Atom an especially attractive option for digital humanitsts.

• Atom is genuinely agnostic about your OS: its Chromium base really does look and act the same on Unix-based Mac OS, any of the Microsoft OS’s, or Linux. It’s never been easier to offer a free tool to a class of students or a team of collaborators and be confident that they’ll have the same experience using it.
• Atom hits a unique balance of hackability and usability. It’s very accessible for a wide range of writing out of the box, while offering you completely open-ended possibilities for customization. Think TextEdit or NotePad with vim or emacs underneath.
• Atom is open source and easy to extend. The chances are good that in the current 1.0 release series, Atom already supports the quirkiest, most specific feature you want in an editor, whether it’s syntax highlighting for your preferred language, code “snippets” that automate actions, or themes for styling your text’s display, but if that’s not the case, you can add your own plugin or wait for someone else do it. (It will probably happen soon enough anyway, given the exceptionally productive community that’s already grown up around Atom.)
• Because of its flexibility, Atom is equally suitable for writing code or structured text in syntaxes like Markdown. Atom configured the way I like it feels like the best Markdown editors when I’m writing text, but also feels like a great editor when I’m coding. We’ll see how that wears over time, but right now, I’m replacing MultiMarkdown Composer + emacs for Atom alone in my routine workflow: getting down to a single editor is a real advantage.

The only drawback to Atom that I can see at this point is a consequence of the architecture that makes all its positive features possible: because it’s based on web technologies, you can’t use it within a terminal, so when you need to ssh over the internet to correct a typo on a web site or fix an error in a script, you’ll still need your old editor. (The emacs/vi wars will never end.)

But apart from that, Atom is a great fit for my work as a digital humanist: I write, I code, and I work constantly in collaborative teams. (As you’d guess, a project coming from github’s development team includes great built-in support for version control.) I’ll install it this week in the St. Isidore of Seville research lab before the research teams of the Holy Cross Manuscripts, Inscriptions and Documents Club start their regular fall schedule.