Atom

Atom is an open-source, configurable yet beginner-friendly text editor developed by GitHub. It is built using web technologies on top of the Electron framework. Admin users (that is users in the wheel group, that are able to execute sudo commands) or users with the root password can install Atom, while other users can run Atom via AppImages.

Installation

Its development team provides Debian, RPM and tar (file extension: .tar.gz) binaries for 64-bit Linux, but not for 32-bit systems. There are three main ways of installing Atom:

1. Using official binary releases from the Atom development team (suitable for 64-bit systems only).

2. Using the unofficial mosquito/atom Copr (for 32-bit and 64-bit systems).

3. By manually compiling its source code and installing the resulting RPM.

The fastest of these methods is probably #1. This option does not have auto-updating, however, so when new releases of Atom come out in order to upgrade you will have to manually re-download and install the RPMs of these newer releases. Option 2 is fairly fast too, but the Copr does tend to lag a couple of days behind the latest Atom release. Despite this the Copr option does have auto-updating.

Official binaries

To install Atom from the official RPM package provide by the Atom team (which is only suitable for 64-bit systems!) for the latest stable (as opposed to beta releases which are also packaged at RPMs) Atom release, run:

$ sudo dnf install $(wget -q "https://api.github.com/repos/atom/atom/releases/latest"  -O - | grep "https.*atom.x86_64.rpm" | cut -d '"' -f 4)

While there is no official way to auto-update these binaries here is a ~/.bashrc (also compatible with the Zsh shell's ~/.zshrc file) snippet that will automatically check for available Atom updates and install them whenever one opens a terminal:

ATOM_INSTALLED_VERSION=$(rpm -qi atom | grep "Version" |  cut -d ':' -f 2 | cut -d ' ' -f 2)
ATOM_LATEST_VERSION=$(wget -q "https://api.github.com/repos/atom/atom/releases/latest"  -O - | grep -E "https.*atom-amd64.tar.gz" | cut -d '"' -f 4 | cut -d '/' -f 8 | sed 's/v//g')

if [[ $ATOM_INSTALLED_VERSION < $ATOM_LATEST_VERSION ]]; then
  sudo dnf install -y https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v${ATOM_LATEST_VERSION}/atom.x86_64.rpm
fi

Copr

To install Atom from the mosquito/atom Copr run:

$ sudo dnf copr enable mosquito/atom 
$ sudo dnf install atom

Building from source

There is an official guide to installing Atom from source code on Linux.

AppImage

To run Atom using an AppImage one merely needs to download or build a suitable AppImage, mark it as executable and then run it. Fusion809 has written a shell script for building an AppImage locally and installing a desktop configuration file (to run this AppImage) and icon for the present user. To use it run (assuming git is installed):

git clone https://github.com/fusion809/atom-runner
cd atom-runner
./main.sh

External links

• Ask Fedora questions with the atom tag