atom/docs/internals-guide.md

A Guide to Atom's Internals

Views

SpacePen Basics

Atom's view system is built around the SpacePen view framework. SpacePen view objects inherit from the jQuery prototype, and wrap DOM nodes

View objects are actually jQuery wrappers around DOM fragments, supporting all the typical jQuery traversal and manipulation methods. In addition, view objects have methods that are view-specific. For example, you could call both general and view-specific on the global rootView instance:

rootView.find('.editor.active') # standard jQuery method
rootView.getActiveEditor()      # view-specific method

If you retrieve a jQuery wrapper for an element associated with a view, use the .view() method to retrieve the element's view object:

# this is a plain jQuery object; you can't call view-specific methods
editorElement = rootView.find('.editor.active')

# get the view object by calling `.view()` to call view-specific methods
editorView = editorElement.view()
editorView.setCursorBufferPosition([1, 2])

Refer to the SpacePen documentation for more details.

RootView

The root of Atom's view hiererchy is a global called rootView, which is a singleton instance of the RootView view class. The root view fills the entire window, and contains every other view. If you open Atom's inspector with alt-meta-i, you can see the internal structure of RootView:

Models