Several Atom features depend on potentially long-running computations based on the contents of open buffers, but until recently, it was only possible to access a buffer’s text from JavaScript running on the main thread. This made it difficult to guarantee Atom’s responsiveness in all scenarios, especially when editing larger files.

That situation changed with the release of Atom 1.19, which opened the door to greatly increased parallelism via a new text-storage data structure that is implemented in C++. This new design provides many benefits for performance and scalability, chief among them the ability for worker threads to read snapshots of previous buffer states without blocking writes on the main thread. In this post, we’ll describe Atom’s new approach to text storage in depth, then explore the first of many optimizations it makes possible.

Today’s release of Atom 1.21 features Language Server Protocol support, the first of many deeper language integration features, which we’re calling Atom IDE. It also includes a new, unified filesystem watcher API and build status indicators.

Atom 1.20 is available on the stable channel today and features numerous improvements in the github, find-and-replace, and language-php packages.

GitHub, in collaboration with Facebook, are pleased to announce the launch of Atom-IDE - a set of optional packages to bring IDE-like functionality to Atom.

Today’s Atom 1.19 release offers improved performance and responsiveness via major architectural updates and an upgrade to Electron 1.6.9.

In Atom 1.19, we’re landing a complete rewrite of the text editor’s DOM interaction layer that improves rendering performance and simplifies the code. Prompted by the availability of some valuable new DOM APIs with the upgrade to Electron 1.6, we decided to start over from the beginning and take a critical look at the structure and performance of every aspect of our DOM interaction. You should observe the biggest difference when scrolling. Here is a typical frame after scrolling by 15 lines before and after the rewrite:

Before: Scrolling 15 lines in Atom 1.18 (~30ms):

After: Scrolling 15 lines in Atom 1.19 (~16ms):

About a 50% improvement, give or take some noise on any given frame.

Today’s Atom 1.18 release introduces Git and GitHub integration right inside your editor!

This is a guest post written by Facebook’s Nuclide team member @matthewwithanm. He tells the story how the new docks got introduced to Atom and how package authors can make great use of them.

One of the things that the Nuclide team has always really loved about Atom is how it lets us extend and experiment with UI. Tools like Outline View, Console, Diagnostics, and the Debugger all need custom UI and, up until recently, their natural home was Atom’s Panels. Located at the edges of the window, panels are a great place for these kind of graphical tools but they have a couple of issues.

A text editor is at the core of the developer’s toolbox, but many other useful pieces of software coexist along with it, such as Git and GitHub. Starting today, Atom adds Git and GitHub integration directly in Atom via the GitHub package. This is a new core package included with Atom and is available right now in today’s 1.18 beta release. Be sure to check out github.atom.io for more information!

Today’s Atom 1.17 release comes with the introduction of docks, faster startup time with V8 snapshots, farewell to jQuery and other improvements.