Atom 1.21
October 3, 2017 iolsen
Today’s release of Atom 1.21 features Language Server Protocol support, the first of many deeper language integration features, which we’re calling Atom IDE. It also includes a new, unified filesystem watcher API and build status indicators.
Language Server Integration and Atom IDE
Atom’s been straddling the fence between text editor and IDE for years. We’ve come to believe that a benefit of Atom’s hyper-modular architecture is that users who want more IDE features can have them without affecting the experience of those who don’t. Atom 1.21 takes the first step down this path with Language Server Protocol support and ready-made integrations with five existing language servers.
These features are supported in Atom 1.21 and later but not part of the default Atom install. You’ll need to install atom-ide-ui
and an IDE package for the language(s) you use. Check out the Atom IDE post for details.
Filesystem Watcher API
Atom and its ecosystem of packages use a number of npm packages to watch the file system for changes. As we worked on the Git integration and Language Server support this patchwork approach left us wanting something simpler and more reliable across platforms. Atom 1.21 includes the first version of this new API. While the underlying implementation is still under development the API itself is stable and ready for use and feedback from package authors. Check out this PR or the full API docs get started.
More GitHub PR Events and Build Status
The GitHub integration continues to get richer in this release. We’ve added new PR timeline events and PR build status.
Other Notable Changes
- MacOS native tabs are now supported.
- We restored Atom’s ASAR archive to improve performance in several scenarios, most notably installation on Windows.
- Lots of language-specific grammar improvements were made, including the addition of TypeScript.
Don’t forget to check out all the other improvements shipping with this version in the release notes!
Atom 1.22 Beta
Atom 1.22 is now available on the beta channel and it includes a number of fixes to performance and usability.
Users who work with large projects will be happy to see we resolved a long-standing performance issue related to spawning Git processes to fetch Git status. This manifested in periodic pauses of Atom’s UI and we’ve seen a noticeably smoother experience.
It’s now easier to find the bracket corresponding to the one under your cursor if you enable the new setting in the bracket-matcher package:
To retain the sanity of those writing long markdown documents, the scroll position of the markdown preview no longer resets to the top when you save!
Finally, there has been another raft of improvements to many bundled language grammar packages. Block comment handling has been improved in CoffeeScript and YAML. A major regex performance improvement has been made in the JavaScript grammar package. The HTML package has a number of fixes for improved tag tokenization.
There are many more details in the release notes.
Get all these improvements today by joining the Atom Beta Channel!