atom from scratch

Atom for OCaml

Atom, made by the GitHub company, is a fast-growing and promising text editor with IDE features and increasing support for OCaml. One of its interesting features is that it can mimic vi, in a more convenient and modern GUI. It can also easily integrate the OCamlMakefile-based build process.

Installing Atom

Download and install the atom*.deb file. from atom.io first.

Install the nuclide-ocaml package to get ocamlmerlin integration. You do not need the full Nuclide setup (comprising of multiple packages wrapper by nuclide-install), which is not particularly useful for OCaml. For the installation process, you can use the GUI (settings (Ctrl+,) -> install) or the local CLI package manager:

apm install nuclide-ocaml language-ocaml

Other useful packages recommended: minimap, minimap-bookmarks, minimap-selection, minimap-cursorline, hyperclick, language-ocaml, vim-mode, ex-mode, build, build-make

Benefit

The nuclide-ocaml package requires ocamlmerlin executable presence on the execution path, and gives auto-completion.

Now when you type e.g. "List.m" it will show a dynamic dropdown with appropriate Pervasives functions along with their types, below the list of snippets given by the language-ocaml package.