GitHub’s Atom 1.0 has Serious Potential
GitHub’s Atom 1.0 is more than a mere code editor. It has an assortment of recently created add-ons and also functions as a platform for the building of IDEs and other editors. Atom has only been available to the public for a little over a year, yet it has received a complete 1.0 revision. Many believe that it will fulfill its potential to become the foundation for a myriad of other important projects.
When GitHub originally created Atom, it was meant to function as a means of combining the aesthetic appeal of certain editors with the programmability of programs like Eclipse. It can operate with nearly any file syntax or language. Thanks to its MIT licensing, it can function as the basis for all sorts of other programs. Atom’s genesis stems from the Node.js engine and Google’s Chromium.
The editor’s front end and GUI are both provided by Chromium. The Node.js engine empowers Atom’s functionality. All sorts of add-ons for the editor popped up as early as a year before its release. These include packages like minimap and an add-on that offers a visual overview in the right-hand margin of the file that is currently being edited.
Atom has become wildly successful as evidenced by Facebook’s Nuclide Ide, which is based on Atom. While Nuclide was originally meant to be used strictly at Facebook, it is actually built upon Atom through the offering of features like React/React Native frameworks and the support of Facebook’s HHVM language as well as the development on remote Node.js occurrences through a SSH connection.
Atom’s developers have stated that they are working to make Atom functional for files of varying sizes. The 1.0 version now offers support for ES6 language. This alteration will ameliorate the development process for Atom as 
well as projects in JavaScript 6. The press release describing Atom 1.0 also suggested that securing the core functionality and the editor’s API are merely the “beginning”. The announcement noted that future features will center on obtaining the platform’s maximum potential.
Considering that Atom 1.0 was created by GitHub, many industry experts believe that it will eventually function as a means of delivering many of the enterprise features that the company has been developing.
