Install Atom editor on Ubuntu

22 May, 2014 — editor, ubuntu — 1 min read

Initial opinion

Looks pretty; well looks almost like sublime, behaves like it as well. On the negative side, it takes time for cold startup. Might not be a big deal for everyone, but that's how it is. It since it's based on Google Chrome/V8(whatever) it might not be any competition to text editors like Vim or Emacs when it comes to handling large files.

Installation instruction

Instruction to install Atom editor is available on github repo

Its quite likely that if you follow the steps given on Github repo it could be a cakewalk but I was stuck with nvm issue. It requires sudo to build the package. I run node using nvm, so I had to include nvm in path.

So the extra step required was to run(system should have Python installed)

1sudo apt-get install libgnome-keyring-dev
2sudo su
3source /home/USERNAME/.nvm/nvm.sh

Complete build steps

1git clone https://github.com/atom/atom
2cd atom
3script/build # Creates application at $TMPDIR/atom-build/Atom
4sudo su
5source /home/USERNAME/.nvm/nvm.sh
6sudo script/grunt install # Installs command to /usr/local/bin/atom
7sudo script/grunt mkdeb # Generates a .deb package at $TMPDIR/atom-build

HTH somebody who is trying to get Atom editor running on Ubuntu. I suppose same steps should work just fine on Debian as well.