Under construction.

Rbox

I want to share my experience of using Atom as my day-to-day text editor for whom need coding and typing. This post inspired by @benbalter’s How I Atom (for prose),ron4stoppable that discus Atom as a computing environment, thought I’d talk a bit coding in R.

I deployed a packaged Rbox package , it designed for running R in Atom editor. Rbox defines the R grammar in Atom editor to work and facilitate with snippets. The R’s code in Atom can be run in see run inline or via terminal. To run inline install hydrogen, the package Hydrogen provides a modern approach of using Jupyter kernels in Atom. It lets you choose which codes (the whole file, a single line, and a selection) you want to run. To run the code using termianl, installtermination. This package provides the access to the terminal in Atom and the code can be run in the terminal without leaving Atom.

Editor

Atom can be used as regular editor, you need to install appropriate packages.

  • Theme-switcher - Switch between dark and light themes, helpful if you ever work outside.
  • Minimap - It provides a preview of the full source code.
  • Split - When working on a long text code, split (right click to select it) provides very useful method for working on different part of file.
  • Shortcut keys - Atom has several shortcut keys, look at settings>Keybindings for the existing shortcut keys in your Atom. A short review can be found in Shortcuts, I often use cmd+shift+d: duplicate the selected code. ctrl+F2: mark the line\lines. Cmd+/: inserts the comment character immediately in the beginning of line. IF your plain text is R, it adds # at in front of line. ctrl-tab (ctrl-shift-tab): move through the current open tabs (forward and backwards). cmd-shift-p to access the Command Palette.

Theme

Select an appropriate theme from settings>Themes. I personally use UI Theme: One Dark and Syntax Theme: One Dark.

Markdown

There’s a number of Markdown-specific packages, I like Markedown Previrew enhanced and Markedown Previrew among many other.

Linters

Linter compare the current file with a predefined structure. Rbox has Grammar that can show mistake in the script file, there is linter for R, I am not using it because it is very sensitive to the space between parentheses.

I like linter for spell checks. @balter’s “How I Atom” post gave a short description, see below

Prose linters

There are a few prose-specific linters I credit for improving my day-to-day writing:

  • linter-write-good - A grammar linter, Write Good checks all sorts of things, like cliches, passive voice, and unnecessarily wordy phrases.
  • linter-markdown - This linter, based on Remark JS lints Markdown formatting, ensuring things like headings are surrounded by whitespace and bulleted lists are consistent.
  • linter-alex - Alex checks your writing for biased or insensitive language.
  • linter-just-say-no - Discourages you from using hedge words that weaken’s the impact of your writing.