Awesome Atom Packages

If you are an Open Source enthusiast like me and are in love with Atom, you definitely would want to integrate a lot of useful packages and functionalities in Atom to make your life easier!

In this post, I will write about some of the most useful packages that I have installed.

Let’s get started!

git-plus

The first one to join this list and which inspired me to write this post in the first place is the git-plus package.

  • This is a super-useful package for someone who works mostly on atom and doesn’t like typing git commands or prefer git-clients.

  • One thing to note: Make sure your gitconfig file is configured. You must configure at least the user.email and user.name variables.

  • The usage of the package is really easy once you install and set it up! Whenever you add a project folder initiated with a .git file, you will be able to see which files have been committed, which are newly added and which are modified in different colors in the tree view.

  • You can use either of these options for showing the Git-Plus Palette:
    • Cmd-Shift-H on MacOS
    • Ctrl-Shift-H on Windows + Linux
    • Git Plus: Menu on the atom command palette.

  • You can also right click on any file or project folder and select Git option from the menu and choose the operation you want to perform on the file or folder.

  • If you are choosing the Git commit option, you will definitely need to type in the commit message though (no escape from that!).

  • After typing in the message just save the COMMIT_EDITMSG file that pops up and a git commit command will be issued.

  • To push the changes to remote repository, just choose Git push from the Git submenu.

  • Pulling any changes is also as simple as that - Just select the Git pull from the submenu. Of course, the other commands can also be directly used from the menu.

  • I found this package quite useful and I am definitely going to dig more into it! Hope you like it too.

markdown-preview-plus

This package is super useful for people who use markdown to write technical blogs, documentation and reports.

I use Jupyter Notebooks and I find the idea of writing a .ipynb file to create a markdown report really frustrating and I didn’t want to use any third party markdown editors specifically for this purpose. I have tried using boostnote.io and it is a good markdown editor but I don’t prefer using a separate editor only for markdown. If you like it, go ahead with it!

  • Though atom let’s you preview markdown by default (I guess), it is not quite helpful. The latex equations are not rendered correctly and there is no live reload while editing.
  • This package solves the above problems and you can launch it directly through the shortcuts:
    • Toggle Preview: ctrl-shift-m
    • Toggle Math Rendering: ctrl-shift-x
  • You can also install and enable Pandoc with this package (it’s optional).
  • This package is really handy if you want to write technicalblog posts with math equations.

For more information and custom settings, visit the atom.io page and the github repository for this package.

Written on September 29, 2018