Atom 1.19 text editor gets official with enhanced responsiveness

Atom has announced the release of the next version of its text editor. Debuted as Atom 1.19, the new open source text editor update comes with an upgrade to Electron 1.6.9. The notable change in Atom 1.19 is the improved responsiveness and memory usage. The integration of a native C++ text buffer has helped to smoothen the overall performance and operations of the text editor. Also, the key feature of Git and GitHub integration, which was introduced in Atom 1.18, has been improved with new tweaks in version 1.19. Ian Olsen, the developer behind Atom, said that the improvements in Atom 1.19 are the new steps in the ‘continued drive’ to deliver a fluent experience for large and small files. Large files consume less memory in Atom 1.19. In the same way, file saving in the latest Atom version happens asynchronously without blocking the UI.

Atom 1.19 comes with a full rewrite of the text editor’s rendering layer. This version has restored the ability to return focus to the centre. There is also an optimised native buffer search implementation that removes trailing whitespaces. The new text editor version also comes with the ‘showLineNumbers’ option set to false, by default. Atom follows the tradition of pushing the stable release along with the next beta version, and has released Atom 1.20 beta for public testing. The beta release offers better support for Git integration. Olsen has added a new API that can be used for observing dock visibility, along with fixes for PHP grammar support.