We’ve put together a list of the most essential Atom plugins to make sure you’re getting the most out of your code editor.
Emmet
Emmet is the cream of the crop, taking out all of the tediousness of writing HTML and CSS and making it super fast. You already know how to use Emmet abbreviations: its syntax is inspired by CSS selectors.
Git-Plus
Git-Plus makes committing, adding, branching, pulling and pushing to you git repository just that much more easy. You can do everything you want with git right in Atom so you’ll never have to tab to your terminal again to push your latest code.
Git Status
Git Status is great for keeping an eye on which files have been edited, added or removed since your last commit. It makes each file that’s changed a different colour according to whether it’s a new file or has simply just been edited. It also has indications to which lines inside your file have been changed, too.
Minimap
Minimap is great when in a larger file and needing to find and get to a certain part of a file quickly.
Tabs to Spaces
Tabs to Spaces converts leading whitespace to either all spaces or all tabs.
atom.io/packages/tabs-to-spaces
Colour Picker
Colour Picker is a very handy tool for selecting a colour on the fly – maybe you need a darker shade of blue all you have to do is CMD-SHIFT-C / CTRL-ALT-C and find the colour you need.
Pigments
Pigments displays colours in your project. It scans source files in your project directories looking for colours and will build a palette with all of them. Then for each opened file, it will use the palette to evaluate the value of a given colour. This is great when you’re using a variable colour naming system that doesn’t specify the colour.
You can also enable pigments in the minimap plugin with this: https://atom.io/packages/minimap-pigments
Seti Icons
Seti Icons adds beautiful icons to your files making it easier to find which file you’re looking for.
Sync Settings
This plugin is essential if you have two set-ups, or are transferring to a new machine. This backs up all of the settings and plugins in Atom to a gist which you can restore from and backup to.
