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Chapter 1: Getting Started

  • Why Atom?
  • Installing Atom
  • Atom Basics
  • Summary

Chapter 2: Using Atom

  • Atom Packages
  • Moving in Atom
  • Atom Selections
  • Editing and Deleting Text
  • Find and Replace
  • Snippets
  • Autocomplete
  • Folding
  • Panes
  • Pending Pane Items
  • Grammar
  • Version Control in Atom
  • GitHub package
  • Writing in Atom
  • Basic Customization
  • Summary

Chapter 3: Hacking Atom

  • Tools of the Trade
  • The Init File
  • Package: Word Count
  • Package: Modifying Text
  • Package: Active Editor Info
  • Creating a Theme
  • Creating a Grammar
  • Publishing
  • Iconography
  • Debugging
  • Writing specs
  • Handling URIs
  • Cross-Platform Compatibility
  • Converting from TextMate
  • Hacking on Atom Core
  • Contributing to Official Atom Packages
  • Summary

Chapter 4: Behind Atom

  • Configuration API
  • Keymaps In-Depth
  • Scoped Settings, Scopes and Scope Descriptors
  • Serialization in Atom
  • Developing Node Modules
  • Interacting With Other Packages Via Services
  • Maintaining Your Packages
  • How Atom Uses Chromium Snapshots
  • Summary

Appendix A: Resources

  • Glossary

Appendix B: Shadow DOM

  • Removing Shadow DOM styles

Appendix C: Upgrading to 1.0 APIs

  • Upgrading Your Package
  • Upgrading Your UI Theme Or Package Selectors
  • Upgrading Your Syntax Theme

Appendix D: Atom server-side APIs

  • Atom package server API
  • Atom update server API

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  • windows
  • linux
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Writing in Atom

Though it is probably most common to use Atom to write software code, Atom can also be used to write prose quite effectively. Most often this is done in some sort of markup language such as Asciidoc or Markdown (in which this manual is written). Here we'll quickly cover a few of the tools Atom provides for helping you write prose.

In these docs, we'll concentrate on writing in Markdown; however, other prose markup languages like Asciidoc have packages that provide similar functionality.

Spell Checking

If you're working in text (which includes plain text files, GitHub markdown, and Git commit messages by default), Atom will automatically try to check your spelling.

Any misspelled words will be highlighted (by default with a dashed red line beneath the word), and you can pull up a menu of possible corrections by hitting Cmd+Shift+;Ctrl+Shift+; (or by choosing "Correct Spelling" from the right-click context menu or from the Command Palette).

Checking your spelling

To add more types of files to the list of what Atom will try to spell check, go to the Spell Check package settings in your Settings view and add any grammars you want to spell check.

The default grammars to spell check are text.plain, source.gfm, and text.git-commit but you can add something like source.asciidoc if you wish to check those types of files too.

The spell checking is implemented in the spell-check package.

Previews

When writing prose in a markup language, it's often very useful to get an idea of what the content will look like when it's rendered. Atom ships with a package for previewing Markdown by default.

  • Ctrl+Shift+M - Will toggle Preview mode for Markdown.

Preview your prose

As you edit the text, the preview will also update automatically. This makes it fairly easy to check your syntax as you type.

You can also copy the rendered HTML from the preview pane into your system clipboard. There is no keybinding for it, but you can find it in the Command Palette by searching for "Markdown Preview Copy HTML".

Markdown preview is implemented in the markdown-preview package.

Snippets

There are also a number of great snippets available for writing Markdown quickly.

If you type img and hit tab you get a Markdown-formatted image embed code like ![](). If you type table and hit tab you get a nice example table to fill out.

| Header One     | Header Two     |
| :------------- | :------------- |
| Item One       | Item Two       |

Although there are only a handful of Markdown snippets (b for bold, i for italic, code for a code block, etc), they save you from having to look up the more obscure syntaxes. Again, you can easily see a list of all available snippets for the type of file you're currently in by choosing "Snippets: Available" in the Command Palette.

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