Configuring terminal usage in Atom

I re-visited the Atom editor in the last weeks; after all its performance is being improved step by step¹ and by now the development speed seems to have settled down a little.

Overall, I am quite impressed with how simple the editor is to configure².

For example, I ran into a problem when configuring terminal support. While the terminal-fusion package (a Linux-only fork of platformio-atom-ide-terminal) works well out-of-the-box, it seems to miss a simple way to switch between terminal window and the current editor pane (and to auto-hide the terminal if it is not in focus).

Luckily, there is a code snippet for platformio-atom-ide-terminal³ that just needs a little tinkering to make it compatible with terminal-fusion, and then goes into init.coffee:

atom.packages.onDidActivatePackage (pack) ->
  if pack.name == 'terminal-fusion'
    atom.commands.add 'atom-workspace',
      'editor:focus-main', ->
        p = atom.workspace.getActivePane()
        panels = atom.workspace.getBottomPanels()
        term = panels.find (pan) ->
          pan.item.constructor.name == 'TerminalFusionView'
        if not term
          # Open a new terminal
          editor = atom.workspace.getActiveTextEditor()
          atom.commands.dispatch(atom.views.getView(editor), 'terminal-fusion:new')
        else if term and p.focused
          term.item.open()
          term.item.focus()
        else if term and !p.focused
          term.hide()
          p.activate()

It’s easy to understand what is going on here, even without knowing much about CoffeeScript.

Now just add this shortcut definition to your keymap.cson:

'.platform-linux, atom-text-editor atom-workspace':
  'ctrl-ä': 'editor:focus-main'

And yes, this is an ä you see there – change as appropriate if you are not blessed with a German keyboard layout :-)