Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor for macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows with support for plug-ins written in Node.js, and embedded Git Control.
Is is developed by GitHub. Atom is a desktop application built using web technologies [electron].
Although I may warn you that apps built using electron consume higher memory than others, but it’s features are too good, so we need not consider its memory problem.
It provides great support for plug-ins and themes. Some features of Atom are listed below:
- Great plug-in support
- Cross platform
- Themes support
- Easy to use
- In built system to install thousands of plug-ins and themes directly from Atom
- Absolutely free
- Real time collaboration
- Binding for a lot of programming languages.
Atom support real time collaboration with your partners using peer-to-peer connection. Peer-to peer connection supports safety of your data, so that no third party can interfere or record it.
Its modern look and extensibility make it the best text editor. You can directly commit to your github repository via Atom, this feature saves you a lot of time without much hassle.
In this tutorial we are going to install Atom text editor on Linux mint 20 or Ubuntu 20. Installation procedure on both of these operating systems is same. So follow the guide below to install Atom.
Install Atom from the official website
Go to atom.io and click on the “Download .deb” button to download Atom. We need to download deb package as Linux mint support Deb installation.
Find the file that you just downloaded and open it with GDebi Package Installer by right clicking on it.
Now click on Install Package button to start installing Atom on your system.
You need to give it administrative access in order to install it. Fill in your password and click Authenticate.
Our installation has now begun, it will only take a few minutes to install Atom text editor on our system. You can see the installation log by clicking on Details.
Once the installation is finished the pop-up will automatically close and now you can open and start using Atom. Find Atom in the menu and click on it to open it.
We are now ready-to-use atom. You can customize it according to your needs or can start coding right away.
Install Atom from Software Manager
There is one more way to install Atom on linux mint i.e. installing from the official software manager.
Installing from the software manager is easy, but the reason that I didn’t mention this method in the start of this tutorial is that Atom is available as a Flatpak file on the software manager.
Flatpak files are really unnecessarily large compared to their deb versions. For example, if you download the deb version of Atom from its official website, the size would be just approx. 120 M.B however, the size of the flatpak version is 1 G.B +
You can install Atom on linux using the method below, however the best way to install is the one above.
Open the software manager by searching it in the menu. Software manager is available on both Ubuntu and Linux mint given that linux mint is based on Ubuntu.
Search for Atom text editor in the search bar in software manager and click on it to view its details.
You can see the download size given here is over one gigabyte, to continue with the installation click on the Install button given at the right top right.
Now a window will pop-up asking you if you want to continue the installation and giving the information of required files. If some dependencies are missing, they will be downloaded as well along the original file.
Click Continue to start the installation. If it asks for Authentication, fill in your password to authenticate.
Once the download and install process is complete, you can immediately start using Atom text editor.
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