Atom, “a hackable editor for the 21st Century,” is a really great text editor for both quick edits and serious programming. Atom is free, open-source, and developed by GitHub. It can support a host of languages out-of-the-box, with plugins for even more. What makes Atom really nice compared to Notepad++ is that Atom is cross-platform: it runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Another bonus point over Notepad++ is the in-editor Project tree view for directories. Atom also has Atom IDE for advanced development support. Even though Atom is feature-rich, its response time is pretty fast. It’s a solid text editor choice for both technical and non-technical users.

One of my first blog posts on Automation Panda was Gherkin Syntax Highlighting in Notepad++. It continues to be one of my post popular posts, too. However, Notepad++ doesn’t help feature file authors who use macOS or Linux. Thankfully, Atom has a decent plugin for Gherkin. In fact, it has a number of Gherkin plugins available.

On macOS, Settings are available under File -> Preferences… and on the Install tab.

I installed the first package, language-gherkin, and I was very pleased with the syntax highlighting. I also tried the internationalized package below it in the list, but the colors were not as nice (call me picky). It looked like other packages could do autocomplete and table formatting as well.

Nice!

Atom is just another great option for writing Gherkin feature files.