Turning Atom Into A Rust IDE

I’ve been using Atom since way back in the Beta mainly as an alternative to Sublime Text because I didn’t get on with the way Sublime handles packages and add ins.

I have used Atom to write a lot of different languages: C#, C, C++, javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Erlang and LISP to name a few. Atom handled all of the language formatting plugins without blinking.

A while ago I wrote an Erlang UDP Server with SFML and C++ as a UDP client. Recently I’ve been playing with Rust on and off (mostly trying to get it to compile on my Pi). Rust seems like another perfect language to write a UDP backend with, so I am now rewriting the backend from my previous project in Rust.

That lead me to wanting an IDE for Rust. Using Atom and a few plugins, I’ve now managed to have a rust IDE that I never have to leave.

To start off with I wanted syntax highlighting, so I search the package library and found language-rust. This was exactly what I needed, the Bugs on the page says it might not be complete but I have found it to be more than good enough.

The next thing I wanted was error checking inline, much like Visual Studios red squiggly lines. For this I found linter-rust, with this I also had to install a parent plugin called linter. This give an error overview in the footer and if I hover the errors I get a nice little tool tip.

Now the final thing I needed to do was to stop myself needing to tab between a console window and the code for compiling, enter terminal-plus. This give me a popup console inside Atom with the default root being the project root. I had to install a node module for this to work but since I already have node installed and configured this was no problem.

So now I can code in Rust as if I was in a full blown Rust IDE. All that is missing is compile/run/test buttons but since Atom is so hackable I might just get round to adding them myself.