Atom & Löve - The Best Text Editor + Framework Combo

a frequently asked question in the comment section has been regarding my atom setup in this video i will try to cover everything from running your game through atom to the packages that i have installed we will also look at some neat tips and tricks that will help you level up your coding before we get started with anything else let's head over to the setting page and fix a couple of essential things click on editor there you will find scroll past end without it enabled you can only scroll to the last line once turned on however you can scroll much further down also make sure that multi-cursor on click is enabled with this enabled you can hold down control and click in order to create a new cursor which is super useful when you need to edit multiple lines at the same time finally if you dislike software telling you how to format your code you can get rid of this annoying line by setting the preferred line length to something more suitable such as 999991 see it's gone now let's start by having a look at some useful packages which i use on a daily basis a package is basically like an add-on something which we can install to augment atom and gain access to new features and functionality which are not available by default to install a new package you need to navigate to the package installation page and make sure that packages is selected not themes atom does not provide syntax highlighting for lua by default in order to fix this you can download the package language lua once installed it will not only give you syntax highlighting on your code but also provides you with a ton of incredibly useful snippets which you can view in the settings window of the package i can for example type fun and then tab in order to trigger the function snippet currently the name of the function is selected so i can easily rename it after that i can press tab again which takes me to the arguments another tab takes me to the body of the function up until a couple of years ago i used another text editor called sublime text 3 and one of my favorite features of that editor is the mini-map so when i swapped to atom one of the first packages that i installed was the mini-map package what it does is add a small overview of your code in the top right corner you are also able to navigate to any place in the code by clicking on it like so if the code in your mini-map lacks color you can enable the syntax highlight by clicking on the cog wheel and checking the box called highlight you can find more detailed settings by navigating to the package tab and clicking on the settings button on the package here you can also disable and uninstall packages which you no longer wish to use remember that you may need to restart atom in order to make certain packages function after installing them in previous videos i have shown a couple of different ways of launching your love game both by drag and dropping your project folder onto the love.exe file as well as creating a batch file which automates this the benefit of those methods is that they are editor agnostic they work no matter what you use however if you do have atom which if you don't would be kind of strange since you clicked on this video there is a much faster way to launch your game and that is through the love build package this package extends another package named build so you need to make sure that you get both of them this is the first package which does not work out of the box first of all you need to have installed love you will then need to add love's installation path to your system's environment variable paths you can simply search for environment and it should show up click on the environment variables button then you need to select the path variable and press edit finally press new and paste in your installation path to love you find the key binds for running your game in the settings page of the build package also make sure that you have added your project folder like so now all you need to do in order to run the game is to press f9 the next package that we are going to take a look at is called project manager just like the name implies it helps you organize your projects and allow you to quickly tab between them after installing the package you're able to save any currently open project using the project manager save project command you can add this command to a keybind but since this is a command which i personally use quite infrequently i prefer to call it using the command palette which you can access by pressing ctrl shift p here you can search for all of the atom commands including the commands which your packages add if i search for project you can see that the save project option appears after selecting it you are able to customize how the project will be displayed in your project list speaking of the project list you access it by pressing ctrl alt p here i have a few different projects which i have saved and as you can see it is very fast and easy to swap between them atoms support certain keywords which can be added as a prefix to your comment a couple of examples of this include to do fix me and bug the next package which we're going to take a look at named to do show utilizes this and enables you to keep track of things which need to be done in your project if i press shift alt t it brings up a list of comments which contain these specific keywords i can then click on them in order to quickly navigate to them if you click on the cogwheel you can see which keywords it is currently set to track you can also see all of the things which can be added to your table in the off table list to change the order and which things are in the table simply drag them around like so i have set it up to show the type first and then the text this feels logical to me but feel free to experiment the last package which we will look at in this video is called sort selected elements it's really rather simple if you select some code you can alphabetically sort it by pressing ctrl shift s let's say you have a table of strings which you want to display in alphabetical order not only does it make it easier for you to navigate a large table in order to find a specific string it also saves your game from having to sort it during runtime like all other packages the settings page gives you a ton of options which you can tailor to your specific needs so far we have added functionality and features let's have a look at how we can change the look and theme of atom to do this head over to the same install page in these settings where you downloaded the packages from this time however we're going to select themes there is currently a bug in atom which causes there to be a wide variety of different themes when all you need are the atom material syntax and the nv dark ui after you have downloaded both of them we can head over to the themes section here you can select the ui theme and syntax theme which i have set to envy dark and atom material this will change the look of basically everything however it is still not identical to what i have that is where the stylesheet comes in through it you are able to customize and tweak the themes that you have currently selected in order to get it to look the same as mine you need to navigate to the stylesheet in the description there is a link to a pastebin which contains all of my settings all you need to do is copy and paste it into your stylesheet and after saving you should see that your atom now looks similar to mine there are a ton of different keybinds in atom to find them all you can head over to the keybinds page in these settings i'm going to cover the ones that i use on a daily basis if you select something you can press ctrl d in order to select the next instance of it this can be repeated infinitely it's really useful if you decide to for example rename a variable ctrl shift d will duplicate the line which you are currently on holding down control and pressing the arrow keys will allow you to jump further this can be combined with shift in order to select variables quickly an alternative is to use the alt key the difference to control is that it will not jump past camel case this can also be combined with shift to quickly comment out selected code you can press ctrl forward slash this toggles it meaning that you can uncomment it by repeating the keybind if you have your cursor in the middle of a line and want to create a new line without breaking it up you can hold ctrl and then press enter this is much quicker than first navigating to the end of the line similarly you can hold ctrl shift and then press enter to create a new line above the cursor pressing the tab key will indent your selected code and shift tab will do the reverse that is it for this video i hope you found it helpful let me know down in the comments if you have any tips for useful atom packages remember to leave a like and subscribe so you do not miss any future videos [Music] you

Channel: DevJeeper

Views: 924

Keywords: programming, coding, lua, love2d, game development, atom, text editor, best text editor, text editor for lua, atom and lua, atom and love2d

Id: 5Tiy8cWkEBI

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021