This is a guest post written by Facebook’s Nuclide team member @matthewwithanm. He tells the story how the new docks got introduced to Atom and how package authors can make great use of them.

One of the things that the Nuclide team has always really loved about Atom is how it lets us extend and experiment with UI. Tools like Outline View, Console, Diagnostics, and the Debugger all need custom UI and, up until recently, their natural home was Atom’s Panels. Located at the edges of the window, panels are a great place for these kind of graphical tools but they have a couple of issues.

A text editor is at the core of the developer’s toolbox, but many other useful pieces of software coexist along with it, such as Git and GitHub. Starting today, Atom adds Git and GitHub integration directly in Atom via the GitHub package. This is a new core package included with Atom and is available right now in today’s 1.18 beta release. Be sure to check out github.atom.io for more information!

Today’s Atom 1.17 release comes with the introduction of docks, faster startup time with V8 snapshots, farewell to jQuery and other improvements.

Over the last months, the Atom team has been working hard on improving one of the aspects of the editor our users care about the most: startup time. We will first provide the reader with some background about why reducing startup time is a non-trivial task, then illustrate the optimizations we have shipped in Atom 1.17 (currently in beta) and, finally, describe what other improvements to expect in the future.

Today’s Atom 1.16 release comes with two more macOS title bar options, a push to remove jQuery and other improvements.

It was a quiet month because most of the team is toiling away on cool stuff that’s not yet shipping. But we do have a few goodies hitting Atom 1.15.

Atom 1.14 has shipped today with improved large file performance, a 64-bit Windows installation, improved MRU tab traversal, and more.

Last year I joined the Atom team with the goal of making Atom a better experience on Windows and thought it would be worth highlighting some of our work so far as well as a few of the things new in Atom 1.14 (currently in beta).

If you haven’t tried Atom on Windows in a while or were just plain heads-down on your projects here’s some Windows-specific improvements you may have missed.

Atom 1.13 has shipped today with benchmarks, reopen project, new Octicons and a keystroke resolver API. It ships without the Shadow DOM editor boundary.

We recently released Atom 1.13 Beta and it features a foundational change to the editor rendering internals that we would like to share with you: the removal of the Shadow DOM boundary from <atom-text-editor> elements. In this blog post we are going to shed some light on the reasons that drove its introduction, as well as why we eventually decided to transition away from it and employ a different technique instead.