Atom bills itself as “A hackable editor for the 21st Century” and that’s certainly true. It is completely free to use and a bunch of fun to hack up.

Text editors, at their core, all do the same thing, even if the outward approach and feature sets are different. So it might not make sense at first glance to use more than one on a regular basis. Because each editor has its own strengths and weaknesses, having a highly-customized environment to edit some types of files is preferable to me.

Most developers I know use at least two editors on a regular basis. Some have more, generally for highly-specialized tasks. I use Sublime Text for all of my coding.

For writing plain text, I much prefer to edit Markdown in Atom. Even though I have an excellent word processor, I usually don’t need all of those features; they get in the way more than they help.

Atom, because it’s so customizable and has great support for Markdown via plugins, was a natural choice. I spent some time honing the configuration to get things “just so” and now use Atom for virtually all of my prose and technical writing.

• Get it here: https://atom.io/