Text editor Atom is now available in version 1.38 which isn’t just faster, but also sports better language support for JavaScript, JSON, and Python.

This includes that Python developers shouldn’t run into trouble when trying to fold if statements anymore. Meanwhile JavaScript users are now meant to be able to fold the default label of switch statements. Another nice fix that made it into the release is one that allows opening files in an existing window when using MS Windows instead of opening a new one.

To reduce the time needed to index medium to large projects, the editor now includes an experimental fast mode for the fuzzy finder. It can be tried by activating the “try experimental fast mode” option in the finder, and is said to speed up searches noticeably.

Since Atom is a GitHub project, some of the improvements are directly aimed at the package that assists developers in working with the repository management service. If you for example edit a pull request comment after updating Atom to 1.38, the editor will display an “edited” label next to it.

It will also show badges indicating a user’s status on pull requests and review comments, which could amongst other things nudge reviewers to act encouraging towards first time contributors.

As per usual in the Atom project, the release goes along with the sharing of the beta of the next release. Atom 1.39 will be a lot about speed and therefore for example include a new backend for faster find and replace operations.

Other than that loading times for multi-megabyte files that contain a single line only have been reduced in the beta and JSX support in TypeScript has been improved.

Atom is an open source project protected under the MIT license. It was initiated by GitHub, where its code is also hosted, and is based on the Electron framework for cross-platform desktop applications.