Atom 1.34 released with commit preview, improved diffs, commit message templates and more

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Earlier this month, the team at Atom released Atom 1.34, a free and open source text editor that helps users to commit with a faster diff view and an ability to preview all staged changes. This release comes with improved commit preview, commit message templates and improved diffs.

Improvements in Atom 1.34

Commit preview

This feature will be highly useful for those who double check the specific changes that are going into each commit. While crafting commit messages, users can now draw inspiration from the diff of their staged changes. Users just have to click the ‘See All Staged Changes’ button above the commit message box, and they will be able to view their staged changes.

Improved diffs

The GitHub package now renders diff views with a text editor which will improve performance. Users will now be able to render large diffs faster. And the text editor key bindings will now work in diffs.

Commit message templates

This release now supports commit message templates. Users can now add a template on a per-project basis or globally through the git configuration.

Changes in Atom 1.34

Users can view a multi-file diff of all staged changes prior to committing
This release comes with added support for commit message template.
This version of Atom renders git diff view with a TextEditor.
This release comes with Kotlin language syntax highlighting in markdown code blocks.

Major bug fixes

The previous release had a bug where package searches were throwing uncaught exceptions which has been fixed now.
Initially there was an error while running Bracket Matcher which has been fixed now.

Users have given mixed reactions to this release. Few of the users think that the team at Atom could have worked on bigger issues related to finder reindexing and Atom-IDE packages.

Few users are comparing this release with VSCode. With some users in the favor of VSCode and others supporting Atom 1.34. One user commented on HackerNews, “What makes you stick to Atom? I switched to VSCode due to Atom’s terrible performance when opening huge files.” Another comment on HackerNews, reads, “I was a big fan of Atom, but it’s constant performance problems combined with the fact that even after Atom’s team rewriting huge parts of the project in C++, doing witchcraft and what not, made me switch to VSCode.”

Another comment reads, “I’m finding VSCode’s performance starts to fall apart completely where Atom performs the exact same as before.”

Few users think that Atom functioned well initially but when it is used as an IDE, it falls flat. One of the users commented, “I used Atom for a couple years and raved about it’s features and package management but when it came to using it as an IDE, it fell short for one reason. It doesn’t have a configurable way to debug across all languages.”

According to some users, Atom uses a rendering layer that doesn’t work along with the goal of a text editor, which is to be fast and responsive. While others are liking how this release auto-formats commit messages and make it easier for highlighting merge conflicts.

To know more about Atom 1.34, check out the release notes.