Atom is an open-source (licensed under the MIT License), configurable yet beginner-friendly text editor developed by GitHub. It is built using web technologies (and written mostly in CoffeeScript, CSS and JavaScript) 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 must use alternative methods of running Atom such as 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. Add Atom's provided repositories
2. Using official binary releases from the Atom development team (suitable for 64-bit systems only).
3. By manually compiling its source code and installing the resulting RPM.
The recommended method is #1. This method allows for auto-updating and dependency resolution, and is the fastest.
Atom's Repositories
For up to date instructions check Atom's page here The instructions are copied below.
sudo rpm --import https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[Atom]\nname=Atom Editor\nbaseurl=https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/el/7/\$basearch\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=0\nrepo_gpgcheck=1\ngpgkey=https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey" > /etc/yum.repos.d/atom.repo'
Then install with dnf
sudo dnf install atom
Or install the beta version
sudo dnf install atom-beta
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 $(curl -sL "https://api.github.com/repos/atom/atom/releases/latest" | grep "https.*atom.x86_64.rpm" | cut -d '"' -f 4)
While there is no official way to auto-update these binaries here is a ~/.bashrc (also compatible with the Zsh shell's ~/.zshrc file) snippet that will automatically check for available Atom updates and install them whenever one opens a terminal:
ATOM_INSTALLED_VERSION=$(rpm -qi atom | grep "Version" | cut -d ':' -f 2 | cut -d ' ' -f 2)
ATOM_LATEST_VERSION=$(curl -sL "https://api.github.com/repos/atom/atom/releases/latest" | 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
Building from source
There is an official guide to installing Atom from source code on Linux. On a default installation of Fedora 34 this method does work.
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