Let's go ahead and install Atom. As long as you're running Linux, macOS, or Windows, you can go to https://atom.io/ and grab the installer. Run the installer and, if necessary, follow along with the prompts until Atom is installed. Now, start Atom and you'll be greeted by the welcome screen, which at the time of writing looks like the following:

Be sure to look at all the screens Atom has to offer. When you feel like you've explored enough, let's add a package to Atom that will complement our shell scripting. If you have the Welcome Guide screen still open, select Install a Package from there. Otherwise, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + , to bring up the Settings screen. You will see an Install option there, which will take you to the Install Packages screen. Search for bash, and you should see the following package:

Click the Install button and watch the installation. You might be prompted to reboot Atom after the install; be sure to do so. If you're not prompted but see errors of any kind, a reboot of Atom is never a bad idea. After installing the package, you will now have autocomplete functionality when writing shell scripts. This means that you can start typing and Atom will try to predict what you want, in the following manner:

On the right-hand side, you can see we started typing the echo shell command, and after the first two letters, Atom presented us with two options that contain those two letters. Once it makes a suggestion, we can press Enter and the command is inserted fully. While it will not save much time in this instance, it can be great for two main reasons:

If you're unsure what the command is called exactly, you might be able to find it with autocomplete.
Once you start writing conditionals and loops (in the second part of this book), the autocomplete will span multiple lines, saving you from typing many words and remembering all the syntax.

Finally, let's look at how Atom looks when you've got a Git project open and are working on files:

When working in Atom, the screen will mostly look like this. On the left-hand side, you'll see the Tree View, which you can toggle on/off by pressing Ctrl + \. The Tree View contains all the files in your current project (which is the directory you've opened). All these files can be opened by double-clicking them, which causes them to appear in the middle: the Editor View. This is where you'll spend most of your time, working on the shell scripts. The Editor View will always be visible, even if there are currently no files open.

By default, there is one last view, the Git View, located on the right-hand side. This view can be toggled by pressing Ctrl +Shift + 9. The code for this book is hosted on GitHub, which you will download (or, as Git calls it, clone) once, without the need to edit it on the remote server. Because of this, the Git View is not needed in this book, but we mention it since you will probably use it for other projects.