How to Install Atom Text editor on Linux Mint

Endrit Qerreti

Endrit Qerreti

Atom is an open-source text editor, built by Github, It is free. User friendly. Has a lot of extensions that you can use when coding or working on your other projects, offers multiple language-syntax support, Cross-platform editing, builtin package manager, smart autocompletion and It is fully customizable, which means you can customize/build your own custom version of Atom.

In this tutorial you will learn how to install Atom text editor on Linux Mint.

Install Atom via Official Repository

This is the recommended installation method because it allows you to get updates when Atom releases them automatically so you don't have to manually update Atom or to download the new version of Atom manually just to get the latest updates.

Step 1 - Import Atom's GPG key to your system

Run the following command to add the GPG key of Atom to your system, simply copy and paste the below command and press enter

wget -qO - https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add 

Once the GPG key has been added to your system, you should get the "OK" on terminal output, this means the GPG key was successfully added to your system, and you can proceed to the next step by adding the official atom repository to your system.

Step 2 -  Add Atom's Official Repository

After adding the GPG key on your system, add the atom's official repo by running the command below, simply paste the command to your terminal and press enter to execute it.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/any/ any main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/atom.list'

Step 3 - Update your system

After adding the GPG key and the official Atom repository to your system,  you need to update your system to ensure that you can install atom.

sudo apt-get update

Step 4 - Install Atom

All you have to do now is to install Atom, open terminal and run the command below

sudo apt install atom

Install Atom Via Package Manager

Step 1 - Download Atom from official website

Go to - https://atom.io/ and click the Download button

Step 2 - Execute atom-amd64.deb

Once the file atom-amd64.deb has been downloaded to your system, open the deb file by double clicking on it

Next, you should see this window, click the "Install Package" button as shown on the image below

Once you click the Install button on gdebi packager window, you will get prompted to enter your password in order to proceed with the installation of Atom, type your password and click the Authenticate button  

After typing your password. you should see this window, this means the installation has started, you don't have to do anything on this step so just let the installer finish.

Once the installation has been successfully completed, verify if Atom was installed correctly, to do this simply run the version command on your terminal

atom --version

You should get an output like this

e94@e94:~$ atom --version
Atom    : 1.60.0
Electron: 9.4.4
Chrome  : 83.0.4103.122
Node    : 12.14.1

The output above shows that Atom version : 1.60.0 got installed on your system.

Install Atom Deb file using terminal

Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the .deb file from atom.io,  you can use the cd command to go to the Downloads folder or to any other folder where the .deb file is located.

cd Downloads

and then simply run the dpkg command to install atom directly from your terminal

sudo dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb

Install Atom Via Software Manager

Atom can also be installed by using the Software Manager on Linux Mint, installing atom via software manager is very easy and doesn't require you to use the terminal.

Step 1 - Launch Software Manager

Click the Mint icon to open the Mint Menu, then type "Software Manager" on the search box and click the "Software Manager" that appears on the right side of the menu.

Step 2 - Lookup for Atom on Software Manager

On Software Manager search bar type "Atom" and press enter, this will perform a search on Software Manager and will show you all results that contains the atom word, you need to click on the first result as shown on the image below.

Next, click the Install button to Install Atom via Software Manager

Once you click the Install button, you will get this window if flatpaks are missing from your system, the reason why additional flatpaks packages must be installed in order to install Atom is because Atom is being installed from flathub repository which is already integrated on Linux mint.


Click Continue and the installation should start

Then you should see the Launch and Remove button once Atom has been installed on your system.

How to Launch Atom

Atom will get listed under Programming categories on Mint Menu, so to launch Atom you can easily do so by launching it directly from Mint Menu. However, you can also launch it from terminal and software manager.

Launch Atom via Mint Menu

Go to Programming category and click Atom to launch it

Launch Atom via Terminal

If you installed atom via the first method which is the recommended method(Official Repo), you can launch atom by running atom on your terminal

atom

When you Install Atom via Software manager, you can't launch as the command above, you need to use the correct flatpak syntax to launch Atom, use the command below to launch Atom.

flatpak run io.atom.Atom

Launch Atom Via Software Manager

To launch Atom via Software manager simply open software manager and search for Atom same as if you were looking for Atom to Install it and click the Launch button.

Conclusion

In this tutorial we covered different methods of Installing Atom text editor on Linux mint. We recommend you Install Atom via its official package repository which is the first method that we explained on this tutorial.