Hello, friends. Today we’re going to talk about how to install Atom on Debian 11.
If there is one thing that makes Atom different from Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code is that it is open source. Because Atom is released under the MIT license.
Why do I compare Atom with Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code? Because Atom is an advanced text editor that allows us to write code in many different languages very easily.
As it is an open-source application we can examine its source code without problems. In fact, the developers encourage us to try it because it is “the hackable editor of the 21st century”.
With Atom we can have everything that advanced text editor gives us, syntax autocompletion, syntax highlighting for many languages, GIT integration, theme support, debugging, and a lot of plugins that even increase its functionality.
It’s worth adding that Atom is free so we can use it in almost any environment or situation.
The only downside I find is that it is an Electron application which makes it a bit more resource-consuming. Of course, this shouldn’t be a problem for modern computers.
So, let’s install it.
Install Atom on Debian 11
Atom provides good support for Linux. Especially for Debian because we can install it in several different ways.
Install Atom on Debian using the DEB package
On the Atom website, you will find a DEB package that you can download without any problems. To do so, go to the Atom website or their Github profile and from there you can download the DEB package.
Once downloaded you can install it by double-clicking on the DEB file or from the terminal using APT which is the Debian package manager.
cd Downloads/ sudo apt install ./atom-amd64.deb Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done Note, selecting 'atom' instead of './atom-amd64.deb' The following additional packages will be installed: git git-man liberror-perl patch Suggested packages: git-daemon-run | git-daemon-sysvinit git-doc git-el git-email git-gui gitk gitweb git-cvs git-mediawiki git-svn ed diffutils-doc The following NEW packages will be installed: atom git git-man liberror-perl patch 0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded. Need to get 7,514 kB/145 MB of archives. After this operation, 707 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
If you want to download it via terminal, just run:
wget https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v1.58.0/atom-amd64.deb
In any case, installation is easy.
At the end of the process, you can open the application from the main menu and start working.
Install Atom via flatpak
Flatpak is a technology of packages isolated from the system and its libraries. This means that they can work universally on almost any system. Also, it adds an extra layer of security to the system because the program will not make use of the system libraries.
In this chaos, we can install Atom via Flatpak and get the latest stable version of Atom.
So, install Flatpak from a terminal
sudo apt install flatpak
Then add the Flathub repository where the Atom package is located.
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Then proceed to install it by running this command.
sudo flatpak install flathub io.atom.Atom
At the end of the process, you will be able to run it from the main menu or by executing the command
flatpak run io.atom.Atom
This way you can install Atom.
Removing Atom on Debian 11
If you no longer want to have Atom on Debian 11 then the best thing to do is to remove it from the system. If you have installed Atom using the DEB package then you can remove it by running
sudo apt remove atom
Or via Flatpak by executing the following command
sudo flatpak remove io.atom.Atom
This will leave no trace of the application on the system.
Conclusion
Atom is an advanced and powerful text editor but with the incentive of being open source and that we can use it without any limitations. Moreover, we can customize it in almost any aspect.
I will learn how to install it, although simple, it can help many novices to get started in programming.
