Atom has been updated! Version 1.36 has better fuzzy find performance and smarter handling of editing individual files.

Atom was originally developed as GitHub's cloud hosted editor before being made more widely available. It has since been developed more as a full featured IDE, with the user interface being provided by Facebook's Nuclide team.

Many Atom users were dismayed when it was acquired by Microsoft as part of the acquisition of GitHub, and doubts remain as to its long term future given Microsoft is also developing its own open source code editor in the form of Visual Studio Code, in addition to the full Visual Studio IDE; how many code editors does one company need to develop and support?

For the moment development is continuing, and the new release has been improved in a number of ways, starting with faster fuzzy finds. Writing on the Atom blog, Ash Wilson said that until now, if you opened Atom with a large repository there would be a noticeable lag before you could use the fuzzy finder to actually open files. In this release, fuzzy finder performance is now better, shaving 40% off the time it takes to index files in medium and large repositories.

Another performance improvement has been made when you edit a single file in your home directory. In previous versions this made Atom process and index all the files in the directory. This happened because when you open a single file, its containing directory was automatically added as a root directory. When this happens, Atom analyzes the contents of the directory, which makes sense for enabling you to make use of persisted session state, but is slow for large directories.

In the new release, if you just ask to open one file, that's all that Atom does, ignoring the containing directory, and speeding the process up significantly.

Another improvement is to the GitHub package. This lets you read review comments left on pull requests from within the editor. You can also expand and collapse the list of files in diff views that show diffs from multiple files, such as commit preview and the pull request files view.  

More Information

Atom Site

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