Today, we’re excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Atom under the MIT License. We see Atom as a perfect complement to GitHub’s primary mission of building better software by working together. Atom is a long-term investment, and GitHub will continue to support its development with a dedicated team going forward. But we also know that we can’t achieve our vision for Atom alone. As Emacs and Vim have demonstrated over the past three decades, if you want to build a thriving, long-lasting community around a text editor, it has to be open source.

Looking to get your Atom package building on CI so that pull requests are updated automatically when tests pass or fail?

If you’ve been watching the Atom organization closely on GitHub, you may have noticed that we’ve open-sourced Atom’s keymap module. In this post, we’ll start with a brief overview of how Atom’s keymap works, then explore recent changes that give it better support for for ambiguous multi-keystroke bindings and vim-mode.

Back in Atom’s early days, the decision was made to support TextMate grammars for syntax highlighting. There were over 100 existing languages supported under the TextMate org. and Oniguruma regular expressions provided great power for complex pattern matching.

Have you ever used Atom and wondered what all the colors in the gutter, tree view, and status bar mean?

Wow! In only a week and a half, the Atom community has really grown. Discussion on the forum is lively, and there’s a real sense that everyone is happy to help new people out. There’s even ‘a community-built, community-driven guide to hacking on the Atom editor’ in the works. Your exploration and experimentation has also brought the total package count to over 500, and we’re still in a closed beta! This is incredible. Here’s a few of those 500+ packages that are interesting:

It hasn’t even been a week and we’ve already seen a lot of amazing packages emerge from the Atom community! Some are super useful and others are… well, useful if you want to blow up your code.

The journey to completely customizing Atom starts with a single step. Today, I’ll show you how to take that first step with a simple tweak to your Atom stylesheet to make hyperlinks in code stand out.

The web is not without its faults, but two decades of development has forged it into an incredibly malleable and powerful platform. So when we set out to write a text editor that we ourselves would want to extend, web technology was the obvious choice. But first, we had to free it from its chains.