A few colleagues have recommended that I try to use Atom instead of Eclipse. I’m happy to try new things, especially as I’ve been on a project for 3 years that was centred around Eclipse and Rational Software Architect and I don’t want to become stuck in a rut.

After 5 minutes, I found my biggest muscle-memory-issue was on searching for files in a directory hierarchy. For example, if I wanted to get a list of everything in a directory structure that ends in “.java” - in eclipse I could do this with Ctrl+H.

After playing with the Command Palette (typing in "find file" and seeing what comes back) it seems the shortcuts to use are Ctrl+P to search for a file given a fragment of a name. E.g. “.java”, “.md” and to search for a string across a project use Ctrl+Shift+F. Easy!

Markdown seems to be the document format of-the-now, so I’m glad that Atom/Github/Github-Pages has given me an opportunity to practice it.

Two more nice pieces from the Command Pallete which I have found useful:

  • Word wrap is now called “soft wrap” (How modern!). It has no shortcut by default, so it can be toggled on/off with Ctrl+Shift+P > "soft wrap"`
  • There is a Ctrl+Shift+M to toggle on/off a Markdown pane. This certainly helps.