A Jekyll extension for Atom

I recently got into the Atom beta and have been using it for the past couple of weeks with no problems at all. One of the big features of Atom is that it is hackable to the point that it comes by default with a make new package command.

The only package I really use at the moment is Zen which is super simple, if you look at the source all it does it attach a couple of extra classes and supply a stylesheet.

Most of my work at the moment has been focused around Jekyll so it was as good a place as any to start thinking about a package. I quickly wrote jekyll-new-post and threw it out into the wild but pretty much as soon as I fixed issue #1 I started thinking of other things I could get Atom to do for me and it quickly became apparent that jekyll-new-post was to focused a name.

Jekyll-Atom

Instead of creating hundreds of Jekyll themed packages I decided to bundle everything into one, this way if you are using Jekyll you just install this 1 package and get all the functionality instead of picking and choosing.

What can it do?

First off it provides a bunch of snippets for HTML/GFM/MD e.g. jv expands to {{ ... }}. A full list of the snippets appears in the settings when you install the package.

It then currently has 3 commands that can be triggered a multitude of ways. One to open the layout for the current document, so this post has layout:post in its front matter if I press Cmd+Alt+L Atom will open _layouts/post.html for me. Secondly it adds a command to the pallet to open _config.yml not the most ground breaking feature but its nice to have. Lastly it provides the same box as jekyll-new-post making that plugin redundant, anyone using it will need to disable it before using Jekyll-Atom.

I’m using this new plugin here with no issue but if you find one you can open an issue on the github repo and I will look at it.

I have a couple of ideas for expanding it but I need to look more at how Atom works behind the scenes and whether I can link into things like autocomplete.