So I discovered Atom today from GitHub’s twitter announcement. I’d been using Eclipse for all my PHP file editing and it didn’t have syntax highlighting enabled by default. I didn’t feel like messing with the settings to find PHP specific settings and enable them. Or it might be that you have to actually download a plugin. Eclipse has served us well for Android developement, but now we have Android Studio for that. So I suppose Eclipse was just sitting there on my machine doing nothing when I decided to use it for PHP. It left me wanting.

Enter Atom! I downloaded Atom and right away liked the streamlined, fast, and efficient UI. It has enough basic themes installed to cover your basic dark/light theme’ing needs. PHP syntax highlighting out of the box? Sure! Interspersed PHP tags in HTML soup or vice versa? No problem, syntax highlighting fully enabled! And tabbing that works great. Pasting new text will paste it after properly indenting the text. You can open an entire folder as a “project” and all the PHP files in it will open in a treeview on the side. And after doing all that, it still loads in less time that eclipse takes to start showing you the splash screen.

So, while I might still occasionally use notepad for editing simple config files, I think for all my coding needs, I’ll move to Atom.

If you feel like it, give it a chance at: https://atom.io/