Tag: Text Editors

Atom.io–The Text Editor Construction Kit

Recently I decided the online text editor I was using to write blog posts just didn’t cut it anymore, so it was off to the Internet to find a replacement. After concluding that all online text editors suck in their own unique ways, I turned to finding an desktop text editor that would give me the flexibility I needed.

And then I discovered Atom.io. OH. MY. GOD.

Atom is a free and open source text editor developed by GitHub that bills itself as “a text editor that’s modern, approachable, yet hackable to the cover.” And they are not kidding with that claim–Atom is essentially a text editor construction kit that will let you create the text editor of your dreams (you dream about text editors too, right?)

So the first thing to understand is that Atom is primarily designed to assist programmer’s writing code. It is awesome for writing prose text as well, but it’s raison d’être is to serve as an open source alternative to current programming editor king of the hill Sublime.

Out of the box, Atom is a decent text editor with a ton of user-configurable options. But what makes Atom one of the best editors I’ve ever used is it’s package and theme manager–essentially a plugin system through which the editor can be extended and modified

There are thousands of such packages that have been developed by users. For example, I’ve got 12 package installed currently, including one that turns Atom into a full-featured outliner, another that lets me toggle a distraction-free writing mode, and several that improve on Atom’s already good Markdown support.

With other text editors, I’ve always ended up finding the one that has the fewest annoying features. With Atom, if there is some part of the editor I don’t like, there are typically multiple packages that will allow me to configure the editor the way I prefer.

Similarly, the look and feel of the UI and the text display is completely customizable. There are currently more than 600 theme packages that users can install. If you don’t like any of the themes, they are CSS-based and easy to modify or create your own from scratch.

Atom is the best text editor I’ve ever used because it’s one I’ve largely assembled from the pieces I wanted.

The main criticism of Atom is that it is relatively slow, especially compared to Sublime. Perhaps because it is based on web technologies, the main place I noticed this was on startup. Atom can take 10+ seconds from launch to ready-to-use, which is a very long start time for a text editor (and each of those packages increases the startup time).

Atom also apparently has a problem with performance when dealing with large text files–when it was under beta development in 2015, it wouldn’t even open files larger than 2mb. That limit was removed, but if you routinely work on large files, you might be better off with a different text editor.

WriteMonkey

WriteMonkey is hands-down the best text editor I’ve used on Windows for day-to-day writing, and version 2.0 of the software adds a couple features that make it even better.

Of course, the main feature of WriteMonkey is the minimalist interface that forces you to focus on actually writing (rather than web-browsing or tweaking WordPress settings).

WriteMonkey does offer quite a degree of customization, however. For example, I like to use timers for writing goals — set a timer for, say, 30 minutes and just sit and write until the timer goes off. WriteMonkey has an integrated timer function that the user can choose to display on a status line at the bottom of the screen. Or not. If you would prefer to see a running count of how many words you’ve written, or the current time, or nothing at all, have it your way.

WriteMonkey includes a couple of nice features to handle comments and information that you want to include or reference in a text file but that is not actually part of the text you’re working on (or, alternatively, needs to be differentiated in some way).

First, you can always add // at the beginning of a new paragraph, and WriteMonkey will treat that as a comment and dim it slightly. Using WriteMonkey’s export settings, you can choose to export a version of what you’ve written with all of the comments stripped, or keep them in and choose to style them differently than the rest of the document, or just leave them in as-is. Again, it is up to the user.

Second, and something I use a lot more, is what WriteMonkey calls the Repository. Hit ALT-R while you are writing and you’re taken to the repository — essentially text that is located after an end-of-file tag in the text file you’re working on. Paste whatever you want in the repository and then switch back and forth quickly while you’re editing your text.

For example, I might have an outline or a series of random thoughts related to what I want to write that I can stick in the repository. As I’m writing, I can quickly switch back and forth between the main text and this supplemental material to make certain that I’m hitting on everything I wanted to address in my essay.

There are a lot of other smaller features that are unobtrusive but really help if you want to use them. For example, I like to time stamp everything I write and WriteMonky supports slash-based text substitution, so I can just type “/now” and it will insert the date and time automatically. Those substitutions are completely configurable, so I could easily create one to insert my signature line or other frequently typed text blocks.

Oh, and it is completely free.