Recommended GitHub Atom Packages for Web Developers

17 Mar 2014

I’ve been using GitHub’s Atom editor for the past couple of weeks and I’ve really enjoyed it. At first there weren’t very many extensions/packages available, but the community has been quick to fill in that gap.

You can browse the packages online or from Atom’s Preferences… (⌘,)

Official Packages

GitHub has included serveral packages in the base install of Atom and in addition they’ve created other helpful packages as well. Some of the more helpful packages I’ve found are…

• Markdown Preview - “Show the rendered HTML markdown to the right of the current editor using ctrl-shift-m”

• Vim Mode - “Provides vim modal control for Atom, ideally blending the best of vim and Atom.”

• Editor Stats - “View a graph of your mouse and keyboard activity for the last 6 hours.”

• Emmet - “Emmet is a plugin for many popular text editors which greatly improves HTML & CSS workflow”

Community Packages

In addition, the community has really stepped up and have written a lot of packages in a very short amount of time.

• JavaScript Snippets by @zenorocha

• CSSComb - “Sort properties of one or more CSS/SCSS/Less rules using CSScomb.” by @wbruce

• CSSLint - “CSSLint error reports for your Atom editor.” by @tcarlsen

• Highlight Line - “Highlights the current line in the editor; really simple.” by @richrace

• Autocomplete + - “View and insert possible completions in the editor while typing” by @rattazong

• Color Picker - “A color picker for Atom. Either right click a color and select Color picker, or place the cursor on a color and hit CMD-SHIFT-C. Currently reads HEXA, RGBA, RGB and HEX.” by @ThomasLindstr_m

• Autoprefixer - “Prefix CSS with Autoprefixer” by @sindresorhus

• JSHint - “Validate JavaScript with JSHint” by @sindresorhus

• Uglify - “Minify JavaScript with Uglify” by @sindresorhus

• EditorConfig - “EditorConfig helps developers maintain consistent coding styles between different editors” by @sindresorhus

..and Just for Fun!

• Asteroids - “…spawn an Asteroids shooter on any web page and then blast away” by @mojombo