Two supported systems and three ways in. Whichever you pick, what lands on disk is one binary with everything already inside it.
The installer puts Atom Neo in your own local app data and adds a terminal shortcut to the Start Menu. It installs for you alone, so Windows never asks for an administrator, and it removes cleanly from Add or Remove Programs.
It can put atom on your PATH and take over .atom files so they run when you open one. Both are optional, both are per user, and running the installer again opens a page for changing either without reinstalling anything.
The installer is not code signed, so Windows will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" panel the first time you run it. That is SmartScreen reporting that it has not seen this file before, not a virus report, and it is easy to mistake for a crash because the installer appears to do nothing.
Choose More info, then Run anyway. A signing certificate is the only real fix and it costs money the project does not have yet. If you would rather not, build from source instead.
The script works out your architecture, downloads the matching release, checks it against the published SHA256SUMS.txt and refuses to continue if the hashes disagree. It needs curl, tar and sha256sum, which you almost certainly already have.
x86-64 and arm64 both have builds. It installs into your home directory, so there is no sudo anywhere in it.
Read the script first, which is a good habit with anything piped into a shell.
ATOM_VERSION | pin a release |
ATOM_INSTALL_DIR | where the files go |
ATOM_BIN_DIR | where atom goes |
~/.local/share/atom-neo and ~/.local/bin. If the latter is not on your PATH, the script says so before it finishes.Go 1.26.5 or newer, and nothing else. There are no code generation steps, no vendored C and no build tags to remember, because the language depends on no third party code at all.
macOS has no published build. Nothing in the language is Windows or Linux specific, so this is the way in on a Mac, but it is untested and unsupported.
git clone https://github.com/cfm-miku-en/Atom-Neo
cd Atom-Neo
go build -o atom ./src
./atom repl
Run atom repl and type a statement. Nothing needs to exist on disk first, and state carries between lines, so it is the quickest way to find out whether you like the language.
The reference covers every builtin, the commands, the web module and the proxy.
$ atom repl > var xs = [1, 2, 3] > print([len(xs) * 2]) 6