Many swear by Sublime, and they have reason to love it — but I personally prefer Atom. Atom simply comes with more features, functionality and “packages.”
Like many perhaps, when I embarked on this programming adventure, I mainly stuck with IDE’s and repl.it — but since starting the boot camp at Flatiron School, I FORCED into using a text editor. No, but really. It just makes life so much easier, and plus some IDEs really suck.. Although my friend, A, would argue it’s better because it saves you space since you wouldn’t be cloning repos off of Github.
Originally I had already downloaded and played with Sublime first, but I remember seeing Atom during the pre-work labs and the manual set-up of the computer, terminal and whatnot; so naturally I downloaded it as well. Clearly I knew what I was doing when installing a ton of things via the terminal!
The day I officially was convinced to switch to Atom was when I had accidentally stumbled upon autocomplete for HTML tags!
And since then, little by little I’ve been learning shortcuts that make my life so much easier. Just not having to switch positions to use the touchpad saves you time and effort. Anything to see the magic happen faster, right?
Most Useful Shortcuts
cmd-d
selects the current word, and press again to select the next instance of the same word (including the current)
cmd-control-g
selects all of the same word for current word — basically what the previous shortcut does, but in one go; although, the previous is useful when you are targeting only a couple of instances of the same word rather than all
cmd-shift-d
duplicate current line (AKA copy the row and paste down below)
cmd-control-up arrow key (or down)
moves the current line or row further up or down in the page — great for reorganizing your code
cmd-shift-enter
creates a new line where cursor is and shifts current row below — you can also simply type out “def” and then press the tab key to give you the “end” and a space in the middle of the block! (credits to S for teaching me his ways)
cmd-[ and cmd-]
indents to the left, or to the right — for when things get messy and you outta make it nice and purrrty
cmd-/
adds the comment syntax for the language of the file
cmd-x
AKA the cut shortcut — cuts the current selection, but without a selection it will cut the current row (can use in place of deleting a line!!)
Handy Shortcuts
cmd-p
opens the Atom file finder to search for files in your project’s directory to find and open — actually fantastic now that we’re working with MANY files
cmd-\
toggle, or open and close the navigation pane on the left listing your project files
a
forreal, just “a” — but only when in the navigation pane and clicked on a folder — this will bring up the add-a-file prompt; can’t express how useful this is when you’d rather avoid generating unnecessary files with “rails generate”
alt-cmd-s
saves all open windows — for those who forget to save! A, I’m looking at you!
cmd-l
selects the current line/row — useful if you need to add quotations, parentheses, string interpolation, or simply delete it
Extras
alt-b
moves to the beginning of the current word
alt-backspace
deletes up to the beginning of the word from where the cursor currently is
alt-delete
deletes from the location of the current cursor to the beginning of the word
alt-d
deletes from current cursor to the end of the word
Packages
open-in-browser
because it isn’t built in like Sublime
file-icons
because we doesn’t love stylish icons for your varying files (different ones for HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby, etc!)
rails-snippets
because manually typing out ERB substitution and scripting tags is SO MUCH FUN!
There’s a lot more but I feel like I’m content with these! I’m sure more experienced programmers may disagree, but I’ll live my best life and you live yours!
