Best Atom Packages for WordPress/PHP Development

Atom is a new IDE from Github has gained popularity among many different developers, replacing IDE’s like PHPStorm and Sublime Text. What makes Atom different from other IDE’s is it is built to be entirely hackable from the ground up, making it extremely customizable. Atom is designed around packages and themes, it even comes with it’s own package manager “apm” which makes managing these packages a breeze. In this article I want to look at some of the best Atom packages available for WordPress/PHP development.

Prerequisites

Before we begin you must install Atom (duh) which you can do from their homepage.

After you install Atom ensure you have Atom’s package manager installed by typing:

apm --version

Essential Packages

Before we get into WordPress specifics, there are quite a few essential packages for general web development you’ll want.

Linter

Validates your code using linters.

apm install linter

Linter Specific Packages

Linter also allows more specific packages for different languages, I’ve provided a quick install command for the most popular. Note that you may need other applications installed to run each one, reference the Linter Atom page for more info.

apm install linter-jshint linter-php linter-phpcs linter-phpmd linter-scss-lint linter-csslint linter-js-yaml linter-tidy linter-htmlhint

Atom Beautify

Beautifies all major languages quickly and easily. Definietly for those of us who write sloppy code

apm install atom-beautify

Minimap

Provides a Sublime-like minimap preview of the code

apm install minimap

Color Picker

A color picker, awesome for web designers. Right click or press CMD-SHIFT-C/CTRL-ALT-C to open it.

apm install color-picker

Emmet

If you don’t know what Emmet is and you do anything with HTML/CSS, go look it up right now. I’m serious.

apm install emmet

File Icons

Makes the file icons look much prettier.

apm install file-icons

Highlight Line

Highlights the current line in case the theme doesn’t.

apm install highlight-line

Project Manager

Simple and easy project manager similar to the one in Sublime Text

apm install project-manager

Livereload

Atom plugin for the popular app Livereload

apm install livereload

WordPress/PHP Packages

WordPress-API

This package provides support for the WordPress Core API and many helpful snippets to speed up development.

apm install wordpress-api

Autocomplete PHP

Addon for the built-in autocomplete package specific for PHP

apm install autocomplete-php

Aligner-PHP

Simple and quick aligning for PHP arrays, objects, etc.

apm install aligner-php

That’s all I have for now, though I will be updating this list often with new packages I find!

Comments

Luke Pettway says:
May 19th 2015 at 12:00am

I've been looking at Atom for a while and your post makes me want to try out all of these packages, many of them I'm sure I'll find immediately useful. Thanks for sharing!

Abhishek Prakash says:
July 19th 2015 at 12:00am

Thanks for the list Zach. I hope my first attempt at WP Plugin development will be smoother with these plugins.

Leon says:
November 30th 2015 at 12:00am

Thanks for this. If anyone get's an error with phpcs locating the path variable, check out the instructions in the phpcs package settings and install various prerequisites.

Stephen says:
December 14th 2015 at 12:00am

Thanks for this, working on a rebuild of my WP based site from the ground up and have also longed to move away from PHPStorm. I think these might just be the plugins to make me completely move to Atom.

Ahmed LAM says:
December 28th 2015 at 12:00am

Thank you for your sharing, it's very useful

Jeff G says:
January 14th 2016 at 12:00am

Thanks for the list Zach. I'm just getting started with WordPress development and stumbled upon Atom and then onto your page. It's about 8 months after your original article and I'm curious if you still agree with your original list or have newcomers come into the fold that you like. Also, "autocomplete-wordpress-hooks" ... Does that replace WordPress-API, augment it, or do they do the same things -- and if so, which one would you recommend? Finally, so far I haven't seen any obvious way to determine which packages may be better than others without trying each one out. Do you have any thoughts there? Thanks ... Jeff

mehdi says:
January 21st 2016 at 12:00am

thank u man ;) ;)

crx4 says:
March 17th 2016 at 12:00am

thanks for your recommendations!

Pablo says:
March 18th 2016 at 12:00am

Wow man great post! I'm now installing atom and all these packages, sounds like i'll be a more happy developer :-)

shawn says:
April 24th 2016 at 12:00am

danke sir!

Imtiaz Rayhan says:
June 20th 2016 at 12:00am

Hi Zach, Thank you for the list. I just started using Atom few days back. I have been using Sublime Text for a long time. Thought may be it's time I try out something new. So far Atom looks good. Thank you again for the list.

Stefano says:
July 10th 2016 at 12:00am

I haven't understand what exactly do the wordpress-api plugin... I haven't found any example on plugin home dir.

vijay says:
July 31st 2016 at 12:00am

i installed all those packages in my atom text editor. now i am very comfort with php coding and wordpress development. Thanks

Ron McCranie says:
August 20th 2016 at 12:00am

Great post. Quick and easy setup.

Tom Jacobs says:
August 28th 2016 at 12:00am

Wow amazing plugins, thanks! :D

Zach Adams Web Developer and Programmer