Customizing Atom Editor

I doubt anyone who writes code for a living or tinkers for that matter hasn’t spent more hours than they’d care to admit tweaking their editor of choice. Suffice to say, I’m in that boat all to well.

My current editor of choice is Atom. It’s open source and more than fits the customization itch.

Aside from deciding on which packages to use (I’ve starred the ones I use) the other element I’ve gone back and forth with is theme & syntax UI. I’ve long been a fan of both Solarized Light and Dark, but have finally settled on Atom Dark and Oceanic Next. I can also recommend Oliver Pattison’s Newbound syntax themes My dream font is Operator Mono, but until I can justify the purchase of that, I’m using Input.

One tweak I just discovered is for adjusting the font size in the panel, or the sidebar. I’d been able to easily make the font larger for code/markdown, but sometimes had to break the readers out to discern what file was what in a nested folder. To the rescue I found atom-panel.tool-panel for just that. I’m currently using 1.4em. Mind you this is on my old 11 inch Air. I’ve not had as much an issue on the iMac.

Another tweak I’ve added to my custom styles.less file is to italicize attributes. I’m also a fan of italicized comment blocks, which is included in the snippet.

atom-text-editor::shadow{
     .entity.other.attribute-name {
         font-style: italic;
     }

     .comment {
       font-style: italic;
     }
 }

I’m sure as I expand my development world, (I have a goal to learn python by Building a Twitterbot ) I’ll continue to tweak Atom, but for now, I’m as close to happy with an editor as I have ever been. Feel free to share with me on Twitter @miklb your tips and trick.