Github has announced Atom IDE, a set of optional packages for the Atom text editor that add IDE features such as code navigation, formatting and auto-completion.

Atom started life in  2014 as GitHub's cloud hosted editor, and has gone on to become is a very popular code editor, coming top in a recent Opensource.com poll. Now, with the help of Facebook it is taking the first steps to being a full featured IDE with context-aware auto-completion; code navigation features such as an outline view, go to definition and find allreferences. It also provides hover-to-reveal information, diagnostics (errors and warnings) and document formatting:

The decision to make the IDE elements optional was explained in the Atom blog, where Ian Olsen of the Atom team at GitHub said:

"Atom’s been straddling the fence between text editor and IDE for years. We’ve come to believe that a benefit of Atom’s hyper-modular architecture is that users who want more IDE features can have them without affecting the experience of those who don’t."

Atom 1.21, currently in beta, takes the first step down this path with Language Server Protocol support and ready-made integrations with five existing language servers.

The initial release includes packages for TypeScript, Flow, JavaScript, Java, C# and PHP, all of which provide syntactical analsyis of code by using language servers. The language server protocol is being adopted by a number of organizations including Microsoft, Eclipse, Sourcegraph, Palantir, Red Hat, Facebook and now by GitHub. The developers of Atom say that with the help of the community, they plan to expand the number of languages that Atom-IDE can support, to include Rust, Go, and Python.

In the more general release of Atom, Git integration has been improved so that the way diff views get opened has been reworked so that you get pending pane support and multiple simultaneous diff views.  FInd and Replace has also been improved so that Context lines are now optionally displayed with Find in Project results. You can set the number of available lines before and after matches in the package settings and modify their display inline when looking at the results. PHP support has also been improved with what the developers say are 'dozens' of fixes for PHP grammar support.

More Information

Atom IDE

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