Github has unveiled Atom-IDE, a set of packages designed to introduce more automation and functionality to the code-writing process.
Atom is an open source text editor used by developers to write code. Developed by Github, it includes support for languages including CSS, HTML, JSON and Ruby on Rails, and is "hackable to the core".
The new features make Atom more akin to an IDE, or Integrated Developer Environment. IDEs are software toolkits that offer developers all-in-one packages containing code editors, debuggers and build automation tools, and are meant to make developers' lives easier by grouping all the resources they need in one place, under one user interface.
The new packages have been developed with the Nuclide team, part of Facebook's Open Source division, and add "smarter context-aware auto-completion as well as a host of code navigation features such as an outline view, go to definition [and] find all references".
"This is just the start of our journey," the company said in a blog post. "With the help of our community, we plan to expand the number of languages that Atom-IDE can support and make it possible for you to run and edit applications, making Atom-IDE a true IDE."
"Our initial release includes packages for TypeScript, Flow, JavaScript, Java, C# and PHP that utilize the power of language servers to provide deep syntactical analysis of your code and projects. The language server protocol is being adopted by a number of organizations including Microsoft, Eclipse, Sourcegraph, Palantir, Red Hat, Facebook and now GitHub too!"
"We hope to see future language support for the great languages out there including Rust, Go, Python, etc."
The news comes in combination with the release of Github Enterprise 2.11, bringing features like geo-replication, hotpatching and nested teams.
Picture: Bigstock (with GitHub logo added by IT Pro)
