There's a new version of Atom, GitHub's open-source text editor. Atom 1.24 has read-only TextEditors, asynchronous context menus, and automatic scrolling on folding and unfolding.

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. Last year saw it taking the first steps to being a full featured IDE, with the user interface being provided by Facebook's Nuclide team.

The first change to the updated version is the addition of read-only text editors. This enables packages to disable input by applying a read-only attribute to the TextEditors. The developers say this is useful in situations where you want users to be able to see code with syntax highlighting, and to let them copy the code to the clipboard, but you don't want them to be able to change it, for example because it’s code in your git history or it isn’t on your local drive.

The next improvement will make working in Atom less annoying, as context menus are now asynchronous, meaning that right-clicking no longer locks up the event loop. Other processing and rendering will now carry on while the menu is shown.

A new LanguageMode API has been added, though this is more to prepare for changes to future versions of Atom. The developers are changing the mechanism by which editors are tokenized for syntax highlighting and folding, with the changes beginning in the next version, Atom 1.25. In order for this to work, the APIs that deal with configuring a grammar on an editor are being altered, with the first of the new APIs included in Atom 1.24. The existing Grammar-specific APIs will continue to work for backwards compatibility, but will be deprecated at some point in the future.

The final change to this release is automatic scrolling of the editor to keep your cursors visible when folding or unfolding large blocks of code. 

Alongside the new stable release, the beta of Atom 1.25 is also being made available, with support for code folding and improved syntax highlighting. 

More Information

Atom On GitHub

Related Articles

Atom IDE

Which Code Editor Do Devs Prefer?

Atom 1.18 Ships With Rich Git Integration  

Atom Asks About Telemetry

Atom 1.5 Released 

Atom 1.1 Released

Atom 1.0 - GitHub's Hackable Editor Becomes Stable

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info