Installing Atom on MasOS X

These instructions are written for installing the Atom editor on Ubuntu or another Debian derived Linux Distribution. If you are using a different Linux distribution then you will need to adapt these instructions.

Atom is a text editor for programmers. It is an alternative to gedit. It also has very good integration with Go.

Installing Atom has two steps.

• Downloading and installing Atom
• Configuring Atom to work with Go.

Downloading and Installing Go

Atom can be downloaded from the project home page. You just need to click the green “Download For Mac” button.

Once Atom has downloaded you need to install it.

To do this you need to open you Downloads folder and find the file called “atom-mac.zip”

Double click on this file and it will expand. Once it has finished you will have an Atom.app file in your Downloads directory.

You are going to use Atom often so you should drag it into your Applications directory.

Starting Atom

You can double click the Atom icon to start. However this is not how you should start Atom when you use Go. This is because Go depends on the GOPATH environmental variable that you created when you installed Go. When you start Go from the Finder by double clicking the GOAPTH variable does not have a value. This means Go will not work with Atom.

When you use Atom with Go you should always start it from the Terminal. To do this you need to open the Terminal application and type

atom

into a terminal.

If you see a security warning when you first try to start Atom like this

It is OK to click “Open”.

Now you are ready to configure Atom to work with Go.

Configuring Atom to Work with Go

Once Atom is is installed you need to configure it to use Go. To do that you need to read our Guide to Configuring Atom.