On February 9, 2016, GitHub's devs made some big announcements for its awesome and acclaimed Atom open-source hackable text editor, which reached stable version 1.5 for all supported operating systems.
As Atom is massively adopted by more and more programmers, it looks like GitHub's developers have speed up the development cycle of the project, and today they've announced the release of Atom 1.5 stable branch and the availability of the first Beta build of the upcoming Atom 1.6 series.
According to the release notes, it would appear that Atom 1.5 is a modest release, introducing improvements to the CJK software, the ability for users to disable the automatic updating functionality, cascading windows below existing ones on Mac OS X, as well as various performance improvements in the marker index.
Furthermore, Atom 1.5 sees the removal of the "release-notes" package, which apparently confused many users when updating the software, and fixes some performance issues reported by users when the Git repository is located in the same directory with Atom (e.g. the Home dir).
What's new in Atom 1.6 Beta
From the looks of it, Atom 1.6 is where the good stuff is, as GitHub implemented block decorations, multi-pane API improvements, a new API (Application Programming Interface) for top and bottom bars, a new pending tabs API, as well as more improvements to the pending tabs.
Moreover, the --wait argument now works on Microsoft Windows systems, there's better support for projects that use submodules, language-js received some improvements, NodeGit is now built in the / Async Git Repository class, and it is possible to move files using drag-and-drop from the desktop into the tree-view.
Download Atom 1.5 and 1.6 Beta right now via Softpedia.
