Getting Started With the Atom IDE (macOS)

Simple Atom setup guide.

In this post I will walk you through how to install and set up Atom to develop and run Python code.

1. Download Atom.

• Atom can be downloaded from here https://atom.io/.

2. Set up your preferred theme.

• From the menu at the top click Atom > Preferences and the settings pane shown below should open up.

• Select “Themes” from the side menu on the left and the screen shown below should appear.

• You can change test out the different themes using the dropdown menus. You can change the UI Theme and Syntax Theme separately.
• You can also download new themes by selecting the install option from the side bar menu on the left.

• You can check this out for some cool options: https://www.developerdrive.com/best-atom-themes-developers/

3. Install some packages

• You can install packages in a similar way to themes. In the install pane the buttons to the right of the search bar toggle between searching for themes and packages.
• Switch this button to Packages and search ‘Hydrogen’

• In the screenshot above you can see that I already have hydrogen installed so I am given the settings, uninstall, and disable. If you don’t have the package installed you will see the install button shown in the second package in the image above. Click to install Hydrogen.
• For some other useful packages check this out: https://wpdatatables.com/best-atom-packages/

4. Get Coding!

• First create a new folder on your desktop or wherever you prefer.

• From the top menu in Atom go to file>open and select the new folder you created.

• Double click the folder on the left and select new file.

• Name the file whatever you like. Just make sure it has the .py file type.

• Start writing some code.

• Now we will use Hydrogen to run our code. With your cursor on the line of the code you want to run click command and enter at the same time.

• Or if you have a whole chunk of code you want to run, select all the lines you want to run and click command and enter at the same time.