Package Power

Atom is a powerful and flexible text editor as it is, but thanks to its extensible architecture, you can teach it some useful tricks by installing additional packages. The official package repository [1] contains hundreds of modules. Some of them add very specific features, whereas others bring improvements that enhance the overall user experience and make coding and writing in Atom more efficient. Need packages like these? Then read on.

There's a Package for That

Sometimes a seemingly minor improvement can have a significant effect. The Seti Icons package [2] is a case in point. Once installed, this package replaces the default Atom icon set. At first sight, the change is purely cosmetic: The icon set uses a different color palette. This is an improvement in itself, but look closer, and you'll notice that this icon set does a much better job of differentiating files by their type (Figure 1). Although the default Atom icon set has one icon for all text file types, the Seti Icons package has dedicated icons for each file type. In practice, this means that you can immediately identify HTML, Markdown, and text files by their icons. This may not sound like much, but if you try the Seti Icons package, you might find it difficult to go back to the default icon set.

The Drag-and-Drop Text package [3] solves another small but important problem for users who prefer to use the mouse when working with text. By default, Atom doesn't support moving text selections with the mouse; however, the Drag-and-Drop Text package fixes this deficiency. Although it supports several actions, their behavior is slightly different from what you might expect. To drag and copy a text fragment, you make a selection, press and hold the left mouse button on the selected text, wait until you see a red border around the selection, drag the mouse to the desired location in the text, and release the button. To move a text fragment, you make a selection and hold the left mouse button on it until the selection disappears, drag the mouse to another location in the text, and release the button. If you release the left button before you move the mouse to the desired location, the described steps perform copy-and-paste and cut-and-paste actions.

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