Hello everyone. I used to do some basic programming in PHP and HTML but have been away from that for years.

And in my old age, the simplest things feel overwhelming. :-(

I have an extremely simple task that I would like to automate, and I am thinking that using the free text-editor called Atom would be the way to go.

For all of you experts and youngins this is probably 5 minutes of work, but for me it feels like rewriting Windows!

Does anyone have any experience with Atom, and if so could someone help me figure out where to get started.

By the way, I am open to solving my problem a different way as long as it is free.

Thank you.

    What exactly is the task that you want to automate?

      Atom is "just" an editor -- it won't do anything for you by itself, other than help you write the code you want to use in whatever programming language you choose to use for your desired automation task. I used it for a little while, so I might remember a few things, but I moved on to VS Code for the last year or two as my current editor of choice. (It's free, too, by the way.)

      As Laserlight said, maybe letting us know what the actual "product requirements" are for your task will give us the ability to get you pointed in a good direction.

        @laserlight and @NogDog ,

        Hello! What I am currently working on is trying to strip out Javascript from web pages I want to save locally.

        Originally I was getting the page source from a web page, pasting it into a text editor, and using find & replace to disable the Javascript - for example replace "<script" with "<!-- <script"

        I thought Atom might help me to write a script to automate those tasks, but since then I had some help writing a PHP script that basically does the same thing, so I think my orginal request no longe applies.

        But while you are asking, maybe it would still be good to know if I can use an editor like Atom to automate manual tasks that I might do now or in the future.

        I don't know any Linux, but often hear people talk about Bash scripts and whatnot?!

        I also know people use Perl and Pythn a lot to automate repetitive tasks.

        Also, on my Macintosh I have BBEdit for simple editing, but apparently to do any scripting you need the paid version and that is $50!!! Not sure if it is worth the money?

        Any suggestions on all of this?

        Thanks!

          You can do scripting with all sorts of things on your Mac, including PHP if it's installed (and it's free). The tricky part is figuring out exactly what to write in that script. A text editor like Atom isn't going to write scripts for you, it just provides an interface to help you write a script. You might be able to use it's search/replace function to remove script tags and their contents, though even that boils down to almost writing a script, as it would likely require a non-trivial "regular expression" search to do so, to account for the several different formats a script section could take.

          If you do it in PHP, however, you could use its DOM extension as probably a more robust way of doing this.

          A quick google search found https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26553113/regex-to-remove-script-and-style-tags-content-javascript discussing both a little bit, to give you some idea.

            @NogDog ,

            Yeah, I'm thinking it's better to use a full language like PHP or Python to do stuff like this versus some hack script for a tool like Atom.

              I don't use Atom either, but I think there is a script package for it that allows running scripts from within the editor. (As I've noted elsewhere, I sometimes use PHP for shell scripting.)

                i love atom from the bottom of my heart!! i really like it. It is one of the best editors i ever saw

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