Developer(s) GitHub Inc. Development status Active | Repository github.com/atom/atom | |
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Initial release February 26, 2014; 3 years ago (2014-02-26) Stable release 1.14.3 / February 17, 2017; 11 days ago (2017-02-17) Written in Electron (CoffeeScript / JavaScript / Less / HTML) | ||
Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor for macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows with support for plug-ins written in Node.js, and embedded Git Control, developed by GitHub. Atom is a desktop application built using web technologies. Most of the extending packages have free software licenses and are community-built and maintained. Atom is based on Electron (formerly known as Atom Shell), a framework that enables cross-platform desktop applications using Chromium and Node.js. It is written in CoffeeScript and Less. It can also be used as an integrated development environment (IDE). Atom was released from beta, as version 1.0, on June 25, 2015. Its developers call it a "hackable text editor for the 21st Century".
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Language support
Using the default plugins, the following languages are supported in some aspect as of v1.5.1: HTML, CSS, Less, Sass, GitHub Flavored Markdown, C/C++, C#, Go, Java, Objective-C, JavaScript, JSON, CoffeeScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, shell script, Clojure, Perl, Git, Make, Property List (Apple), TOML, XML, YAML, Mustache, Julia & SQL.
License
Initially, extension packages for Atom and anything not part of Atom's core were released under an open-source license. On 6 May 2014, the rest of Atom, including the core application, its package manager, as well as its desktop framework Electron, were released as free and open-source software under the MIT License.
Privacy
There was initially concern and discussion about two opt-out packages that report various data to external servers. However, those packages are now opt-in with a verbose dialog at the first initial launch: