atom/docs/focus

Near-term plans

Want to know what the Atom team is working on and what has our focus over the next few months? You've come to the right place. 🎯

The sections below represent our near-term roadmap:

• Atom Core
• Tree-sitter

This roadmap is a living document: it represents our current plans, but we expect these plans to change from time to time. Follow this link to see the previous major version of this roadmap.

You can find our bi-weekly iteration plans by searching for issues with the iteration-plan label.

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Atom Core

Enable improvements to built-in packages to be delivered more frequently

• Investigate options for enabling more frequent updates to built-in packages either by shipping Atom more frequently or enabling out-of-band package updates
• Write and publish an RFC describing the proposed alternatives
• Implement the approved solution such that updates can start being delivered more frequently in the next few months

Clarify issue and PR processes to streamline triage and contribution

• Refine process for triaging issues and PRs across Atom org repositories
• Publish a document that outlines merge requirements for PRs
• Triage existing/old issues and PRs across our repos weekly to clear out the backlog and get our open issues back to a manageable state
• Automate some aspects of Atom issue and PR triage with Probot, especially around ensuring PRs follow our contribution guidelines

Streamline the Atom Core release process

• Implement "Publish" action to publish releases using Atom Release Publisher
• Complete automation of Linux package publishing
• Automate generation of draft release notes for new releases
• Investigate scheduled automation of Atom releases
• Update Atom release process documentation to reflect new release steps
• Move to VSTS CI to centralize all OS platform builds on a single service
• Prototype the use of Electron's new update service to see if it works for our needs

[Stretch] Enable pre-transpilation of built-in packages to remove compiler dependencies from Atom

• Investigate approaches for pre-transpilation of Babel and TypeScript code in built-in packages
• Write an RFC that covers both on-demand transpilation and pre-transpilation for Atom builds

Tree-sitter

Finish work on Tree-sitter syntax highlighting, enable it by default

• Implement parsing on a background thread to ensure responsiveness
• Add a system for highlighting built-in functions and other things not distinguished in the AST.
• Add a system for parsing things like escape sequences in regexes, which are not identified in the AST.
• Document the new grammar format in the flight manual.
• Add a way of disabling Tree-sitter highlighting on a per-language basis.
• Enable Tree-sitter highlighting by default for one or more languages.