Favourite Atom Extensions

Atom is my favourite text editor.

It is fast, lightweight, cross platform and free.

But most importantly, it has a great community of amazing developers who contribute plugins.

Here is a list of the Atom editor plugins that I found the most useful.

1. File Icons

When a colleague told me about this extension it completely transformed my editor. Out of the box Atom comes with a standard document icon for each file. Add some colour to your tree view with the file-icons extension.

Make your tree-view sparkle with a proper file icon per file.

apm install file-icons

2. Minimap

The minimap is a great little add on that really makes a huge difference. It gives you an approximate outline of the code while making the scrollbar larger and easier to grab.

Install the Minimap extension for the ultimate scrolling experience.

apm install minimap

3. Linter Pycode Style

Be notified of crappy code before you publish it with the linter-pycodestyle extension.

This has saved me from embarrassing coding mistakes many times. The example below will install the Python version, but it’s available for many different languages.

apm install linter
apm install linter-pycodestyle

4. Pretty JSON

We’ve all had to inspect a minified JSON at one point in our coding career. Un-minify that JSON with pretty-json.

This one has saved me many times.

apm install pretty-json

5. Launch from Terminal

This one is not an extension but, it’s a really useful feature of Atom none the less.

Launch Atom in the location you are currently working on in your terminal window by typing:

atom .

So, those are the most useful extensions I use in Atom.

I’d love to hear your favourites in the comments below!