Welcome

This short guide is for technical writing students and others who have little or no experience writing in a text editor.

Atom is a free, open source text editor developed by GitHub. For Mac users, Atom may be a good alternative to Notepad ++.

Anyone new to reading and writing computer programming source code should use a text editor with beginner-friendly features. The essential features for beginners are syntax highlighting and live preview.

Syntax Highligting displays source code in different colors and fonts, so you can read your code and distinguish various elements more easily.

Live Preview is a window that appears next to your source code and shows you what your code will look like on a web page. It’s “live” preview because the preview window renders your code while you are typing.

In Atom, syntax highlighting and live preview are add-on features for many programming languages. These features are easy to install and use. Atom for the Beginner: Quick Set Up will show you how to install and use these features for HTML, Markdown, and RST.

Tip

The basic skills you learn here can be applied to other programming languages and features in Atom.