A while ago I posted about how much I like the Atom editor. A few months on, and I'm still in agreement: The Atom editor is an absolutely lovely general purpose editor. It's got a bewildering array of plugins, and I thought that I'd share a few of my favourites with you.

Termrk has to be my number one. It adds a toggleable terminal to the bottom of the screen (and presumably other sides too!). This is particularly useful for sorting out particularly nasty version control system problems, or using a quick one liner to process a few files, or starting a development server in the background. If you know your way around the console / terminal, this package is a must have.

Git Plus is also really useful. As you might suspect, it brings git integration to atom. It has a gui for all the common git commands - committing, branching, pushing, pulling, and more. If you use git, install this package.

Minimap and friends are awesome. If you didn't know about the map mode for the scroll bar in Visual Studio (go to tools and search for "map"), this package brings that to Atom. It has a bunch of plugins, too - which let you preview other points on the minimap, or show the current selection, or show changes since the last git commit. Its appearance is simple and uncomplicated, with one 'pixel' for each character - coloured according to that character's colour. I've been finding it to be just what I need when you're dealing with a large complex codebase. (and minimap-titles is an awesome extra too)

If you use multiple computers, sync-settings is worth a look. It synchronises your settings and installed packages by using a Github gist. I use it as a backup for my settings, but it'll be also useful when I finally get around to setting up a portable installation of atom on my flash drive.

There are a ton of other brilliant packages out there that I've found and I could write about them all night, but that would make this post way too long :) If you're interested in which packages I've got installed, I've uploaded a list to pastebin.