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Introducing the Atom Text Editor

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What's a Text Editor?

2:13 with Treasure Porth

Learn what text editors are, and how they can help you manage and format your code.

[MUSIC] 0:00
A text editor is a program that offers a huge variety of features to make writing 0:04
code easier and faster. 0:09
Word processing programs like Microsoft Word or 0:10
Google Docs are designed to help you manage and format the presentation of text 0:13
to change the text layout, color, size, font, format, and so on. 0:18
In a similar way, text editors provide tools to make it easier to manage and 0:23
format code. 0:27
Text editors can automatically complete HTML tags, so 0:28
that you don't have to type everything out. 0:31
They can highlight brackets and 0:34
curly braces to make it easier to tell where your functions begin and end. 0:35
They can also identify mistakes, like a missing bracket. 0:39
They let you visualize your project's file structure by listing your folders and 0:43
files. 0:46
They provide color coding to distinguish different parts of a program, 0:47
like a JavaScript function or a string. 0:51
You may have used Treehouse Workspaces to follow along with some of our courses. 0:53
Workspaces is also a text editor and is great for 0:57
following along with a Treehouse teacher and for working with different coding 0:59
tasks without worrying about how to set up the project. 1:04
But for a more real world scenario, you should use a text editor installed on your 1:07
computer to work on files and folders that are also stored locally on your computer. 1:11
While the text editor offers some fabulous features that will help you manage and 1:16
organize your code, it doesn't create any special or mysterious files. 1:20
The files you create can be opened with other text editors and viewed, deleted, 1:24
moved, or changed using your computer's file management system, 1:28
such as File Explorer on Windows or Finder on a Mac. 1:31
There are many options for text editors out there. 1:35
Popular traces includes Sublime Text, Brackets, and Visual Studio Code. 1:37
In this workshop, we'll use one called Atom because it's free, easy to use, and 1:42
has great documentation. 1:47
To download and install Atom, go to atom.io and click on the Download button. 1:48
Then, follow the instructions to get it installed on your computer. 1:55
For detailed instructions on how to install Atom, 1:58
click on Documentation > Atom Flight Manual > Installing Atom. 2:02
Go ahead and install it and meet me in the next video, 2:07
where I'll show you how to manage project files with Atom. 2:09