About

As a technical writing student, my instructor recommended we use Notepad ++ as our text editor. I use a Mac. Unfortunately, Notepad ++ is not compatible with MacOS. Although my Mac laptop has a text editor, I realized its shortcomings after seeing an example of Notepad ++.

So, I looked around for an alternative. Since we use GitHub in class and Atom is a GitHub product (and free), I decided to try it.

My needs for a text editor are very basic. I only need to:

• Practice writing source code in HTML, Markdown, and RST.
• Be able to preview what I write.

Installing Atom was easy, but I couldn’t figure out how to get syntax highlighting and preview to appear in my documents. It took some time to figure out how to enable those features, so I want to save other beginners time by sharing my learnings here.

I hope this guide gives you the tools to quickly start writing and previewing your work in Atom (and gives me some practice creating creating a RST/Sphinx/ReadtheDocs project).

– Anita