Atom 1.13 is now available for public beta testing

Nov 10, 2016 01:50 GMT  ·  By

On November 9, 2016, GitHub's Ian Olsen was proud to announce the release and immediate availability of the Atom 1.12 open-source and hackable text editor for all supported platforms.

Atom 1.12 has been in Beta stages of development since the release of Atom 1.11 on October 11, 2016, and it now hits the stable channel with a bunch of exciting new features, among which we can mention international keyboard support, Electron 1.3.6 update, which also brings along Chrome 52 for this update.

"New APIs available in Chrome 52 allowed us to take on this long-requested feature. The new APIs turned out to be less important than we originally thought but we’re nonetheless happy to report Atom users in all locales now get typical keyboard behavior in Atom’s default installation," reads the announcement.

It appears that scope specificity rules for keybindings confused many Atom users, that's why Atom 1.12 drastically simplifies the keybinding usability by introducing user-defined keybindings. Additionally, Atom 1.12 ships with a number of fixes for the Microsoft Windows platform.

Atom 1.13 to introduce benchmarks, remove Shadow DOM

Besides promoting Atom 1.12 to the stable channel, the developers of the open-source, cross-platform, and free hackable text editor loved by numerous programmers worldwide also pushed the upcoming Atom 1.13 version to the Beta channel. And the most important feature of this release will be the implementation of benchmarks.

The benchmark feature will try to improve Atom’s performance. Furthermore, Atom 1.13 will remove the Shadow DOM failed experiment, which was used to the isolation of the editor from unintended CSS, will add an updated version of Octicons with 20 new icons, and new custom keystroke resolver API to improve the international keyboard behavior.

Atom 1.13 is shipping next month, in the first week of December, and it also promises some performance boosters and a bunch of usability improvements that have been detailed in the release notes. In the meantime, you can download both Atom 1.12 and Atom 1.13 Beta for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.