How I Atom (for prose)

TL;DR: How I customize the hackable Atom text editor for writing prose and Markdown.

3 minute read

Inspired by @srobert’s “How I Atom” post, I thought I’d share a bit about my own computering environment. I’ve been using Atom as my day-to-day text editor (and probably the single most used app after my web browser) since the day I joined GitHub, nearly four years ago, and about a year before it was publicly released.

While at it’s core, Atom is a simple, hackable text editor, what makes Atom so powerful is its extensibility and its ecosystem. There are some 5,000 community-contributed packages (and counting) that extend Atom’s functionality and it’s relatively easy to customize Atom’s behavior using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

First and foremost, I’m a developer. While these days I may only occasionally write more than a few lines of code at any given time, over the years, I’ve grown accustomed to developer tools and developer workflows for all sorts of knowledge work, even if now, the majority of my time in Atom is spent authoring Markdown and prose. It’s natural then, that I use a developer-centric text editor for the majority of my work, even if it’s authoring English, and not say, Ruby.

Spending so much time in Atom, I’ve taken a great deal of care to shape every facet of my writing environment, and I’d like to share both some of the tweaks I’ve made, and how I manage them:

Atom packages I use

I highly recommend taking a look at the packages @sroberts mentioned, if you haven’t already, as I used most of them every day. Beyond that:

Quality of life

These packages shave seconds (sometimes minutes) off your day, and given their small size (and overhead), really set Atom apart from other text editors:

atom-alignment - Have a bunch of -s, :s, or =s that your type-A mind can’t stand to see vertically unaligned? Banish them with a single keystroke.
highlight-selected - this one’s hard to appreciate until you actually use it (or until it’s missing). double-click a word to highlight all its uses in the current buffer. Useful for manual find-and-replace operations.
theme-switcher - Switch between dark and light themes, helpful if you ever work outside.

Markdown

There’s a number of Markdown-specific packages I use. Here’s a few:

atomic-chrome - One of my favorite Atom plugins, if you’re in a textarea in Google Chrome, click the menu icon to open that textarea as an Atom editor, complete with all of Atom’s bells and whistles.
markdown-lists - If you’re in the middle of a Markdown list and hit return, it inserts the bullet on the next line for you.
markdown-table-formatter - If you create a Markdown table, on save, it aligns the columns such that the table is both human and machine readable.
wordcount - Exactly what it sounds like, it adds a word (and character) count to the gutter. Useful for composing conference abstracts, Tweets, basically anything with a set limit.

Linters

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a linter, it’s basically an automated script that goes through the current file and highlights deviations from predefined stylistic rules, not too dissimilar to spelling or grammar mistakes on a standard word processor, and I can’t recommend them enough.

linter-your-language-of-choice - Chances are, there’s a linter available for your language of choice, including prose. Whether you’re learning the language or a veteran, the contextual hints it gives you will improve whatever it is you’re writing.

Prose linters

There are a few prose-specific linters I credit for improving my day-to-day writing:

linter-write-good - A grammar linter, Write Good checks all sorts of things, like falses, passive voice, and unnecessarily wordy phrases.
linter-markdown - This linter, based on Remark JS lints Markdown formatting, ensuring things like headings are surrounded by whitespace and bulleted lists are consistent.
linter-alex - Alex checks your writing for biased or insensitive language.
linter-just-say-no - Discourages you from using hedge words that weaken’s the impact of your writing.

How I manage Atom

When I set up a new machine, among the first things I do is symlink ~/.atom/config.cson and ~/.atom/keymap.cson to copies versioned as part of my dotfiles. Of course, if that’s beyond your technical prowess (or willingness), or you need to keep secrets in your Atom config (like API keys), you can use something like Mackup to sync the config files via Dropbox. Since Atom stores its config as nearly human-readable .cson files, it’s easy to version settings and keep them in sync across machines. If you’re really interested, since my dotfiles are open source, you can even browse my Atom config.

You may also notice that I have a packages.txt file in my Atom config, with each plugin I want to use listed on its own line. While not a standard implementation, to be sure, Atom does come bundled with its own Atom Package Manager (APM), which can be fed a list of package files, via the apm install --packages-file packages.txt command, to install a list of desired packages. You can even create that list from your existing plugins with this one-liner.

Working largely in prose, I can’t imagine using a more traditional word processor over something that once customized, is more powerful and more purpose built. I can’t count the number of times I’ve simply pasted in text I’m proofreading and implemented the automated suggestions (or wrote ad hoc rules to check for my own style nits).

That’s how I Atom, but there are a bajillion packages (and workflows) out there. What packages do you use that you can’t live without? How do you Atom?

Originally published December 23, 2016 | View revision history

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Ben Balter is the Director of Hubber Enablement within the Office of the COO at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform, ensuring all Hubbers can do their best (remote) work. Previously, he served as the Director of Technical Business Operations, and as Chief of Staff for Security, he managed the office of the Chief Security Officer, improving overall business effectiveness of the Security organization through portfolio management, strategy, planning, culture, and values. As a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development. More about the author →

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