Atom is a new editor from github.com, which is very similar to Sublime. It’s written using nodejs, coffeescript and less. And it’s opensource. It makes lots of potentials for the future of the editor.

However, atom does not provide a Linux package yet. As it’s opensource, we can build from source.

Build Atom Editor for Ubuntu 14.04

From atom github repo you can find the Linux installation guide. Basically just following this guide should be OK.

The only problem I met is node-gyp rebuild issue. It’s because of the gyp installed in your machine which is conflicting with gyp version in node-gyp.

Simple solution is :

sudo apt-get remove gyp

After that, you will find a .deb atom file under /tmp/atom-build folder. Then install it :

cd /tmp/atom-build
sudo dpkg -i atom-0.95.0-amd64.deb

Now you can open it by command atom.

Configure keybindings for Ubuntu

Most of the keybindings in atom are for Mac OS. You can add your own keys in key map file ~/.atom/keymap.cson. There are some basic hotkeys I have added for Ubuntu:

'.editor':
    'ctrl-l': 'editor:select-line'
    'ctrl-d': 'find-and-replace:select-next'

'body':
  'ctrl-pagedown': 'pane:show-next-item'
  'ctrl-pageup': 'pane:show-previous-item'

Check the source code e.g. edit-view.coffee for available commands you can use.

Happy hacking!