GitHub’s Atom editor unveils commit previews

The GitHub-developed Atom text editor emphasizes capabilities to improve commits with the version 1.34 upgrade, released earlier this month. A beta release of Atom 1.35 has been made available as well, featuring a new pane for previewing individual commits.

With the commit previews capability in Atom 1.34, developers can see all staged changes in a single pane, via a button above the commit message box. The new feature allows developers to view changes before committing them. Other capabilities in Atom 1.34 include:

• Diff views, showing differences between two commits, now are rendered with a TextEditor, offering performance enhancements that allow for faster rendering of large diffs. Also, text editor key bindings work in diffs now.
• Commit message templates now are supported, with developers able to add a template on a per-project basis or globally via a Git configuration. Template text will appear in the Atom commit input box.
• Kotlin language syntax highlighting has been added in Markdown code blocks.
• All directories in a tree view will be collapsed even if nothing has been selected. This happens when the allDirectories parameter is in the collapseDirectory method is set to true. Previously, if nothing was selected in the tree view, this method would return before collapsing anything, even if allDirectories was set to true.

What’s new in Atom 1.35

Atom 1.35 features several changes including the introduction of a pane item in the GitHub package to display contents of an individual commit. Other changes include:

• A pull request pane in the GitHub package now has a tab to show all changed files in the request.
• A button is featured to show or hide input values of passwords in the GitHub package.
• Reliabilty has been improved for the text entry in the settings view.

Where to download Atom 1.34 and the Atom 1.35 beta

Follow these links to download Atom 1.34 and the Atom 1.35 beta from GitHub.