GitHub launches Atom 1.0, the first stable version of its open-source text editor

Source code repository company GitHub today released version 1.0 of its Atom text editor for working with code.

Contributors to the Atom open-source project have made several improvements to the software in recent months, adding features like preview tabs, cutting down on memory usage for large files, making text more readable by default, and, of course, squashing bugs.

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There are several other text editors for developers to choose from today, including Sublime Text, Notepad++, TextMate, Vim, and the newly released Visual Studio Code. But the Atom project has picked up momentum quickly; the community has generated a total of 2,090 packages and 660 themes.

Atom has come a long way since GitHub made Atom available for free download in May 2014, a couple of months after talking about it for the first time.

The text editor now been downloaded 1.3 million times, with 350,000 monthly users, GitHub senior software engineer Ben Ogle wrote today in a blog post on the 1.0 launch. That’s up from 750,000 downloads and 300,000 monthly users. in early May. Contributors have put out 155 releases of Atom.

Atom began in 2008 as a side project for GitHub cofounder and chief executive Chris Wanstrath, initially under the name Atomicity. “His dream was to use Web technologies to build something as customizable as Emacs and give a new generation of developers total control over their editor,” Ogle wrote.

Looking forward, GitHub has plenty more enhancements in mind for the future.

“Of course, we’ll continue to polish the core user experience, improve performance and stability, and add international support, but realizing the full potential of Atom is about more than polish,” Ogle wrote. “We’re considering questions such as: What does super deep Git integration look like? What does ‘social coding’ mean in a text editor? How do we enable package authors to build IDE-level features for their favorite language?”

You can download Atom 1.0 here.