Atom: free and open source for everyone

Ten weeks ago we debuted Atom, the new text editor that’s deeply programmable but also easy to use. Starting today, Atom is available for download to everyone–completely free and open source.

Because we spend most of our day in a text editor, the single most important feature we wanted in an editor was extensibility. Atom is built with the same open source technologies used by modern web browsers. At the core of Atom is Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome. With that comes all the power and innovation being developed for the web. But more importantly, extending Atom is as simple as writing JavaScript and CSS, two languages used by millions of developers each day.

We are open sourcing all of Atom under the MIT license. You can read more about these components on the Atom blog. Our dedicated team within GitHub will continue to develop Atom, but we welcome the creativity, support, and enthusiasm of the open source community to help us make it even better. After ten weeks in public beta, the community has already published 800 packages that extend its capabilities. We look forward to many more to come.

Atom is currently pre-1.0 with a number of areas we would like to improve in the next few months. Our focus will be on improving performance, releasing Atom on Linux and Windows, and stabilizing the APIs before we hit version 1.0.

Download Atom now, and get hacking on it today by creating a package or forking the Atom repository. To stay up to date on all things Atom, follow @AtomEditor.

Written by

Chris Kelly

@amateurhuman