Atom now available on Windows

If you haven't heard of Atom already, now's a good chance to get acquainted. It's GitHub's open source editor, and it's pretty awesome. The developers behind it write:

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

It's different from traditional text editors in a couple of important ways, including a web-based core and Node.js integration. Atom is "A hackable text editor for the 21st Century." It is built on node and chromium and is very easy to extend and customize. Best of all, it is now available on Windows.

I have been using it on OS X for several months and like it a lot. It is great for ruby, python, html, etc. One of its few shortcomings is that it really isn't great for editing very large text files - megabytes of logs, for example. It's been available for Mac OSX for a while already. And for those linux users who do not want to wait for an official release, there is a build howto here.

Curious, or ready to start coding? Here are five tips for getting started.