Less than a week ago we talked to you about the
Atom editor
developed by GitHub and there have been several users who asked me about a vertical line that appears in the text editing area. Next I will show you
how to deactivate the vertical line of the Atom editor and I will also tell you what its use is
.
There are many who have contacted me thinking that it is a program error, but it is not.
This horizontal line serves as a guide when writing code so as not to exceed that length
and there are many programmers who make use of it.
How to deactivate the vertical line of the Atom editor?
The vertical line is implemented in Atom through a package called
wrap-guide
. This package is installed and activated by default, so it
will
be
enough to disable it to deactivate the vertical line
.
For this, just go to the
Packages > Settings View > Manage Packages
menu and search the list for the
wrap-guide
package. Finally, press the
"Disable"
button and the vertical line will disappear.
Alternative option: change the opacity of the vertical line.
There are users who choose not to deactivate the vertical line, but do
reduce their visibility by changing the degree of opacity
. For this, we will have to go to the
File > Stylesheet
menu and the Atom editor's style sheet will open.
Simply add the CSS of
.wrap-guide
in the rules of
atom-text-editor
, so that we have something like this:
atom-text-editor {
.wrap-guide {
opacity: .25;
}
}
In the example I have set an opacity degree of
.25
, but you can use the value that best suits your preferences. Once the opacity is modified, it is enough to save the changes with the key combination
Control + S
and the new style will be applied automatically.
What is the vertical line of the Atom editor for?
This line is activated by default and visually shows the limit of 80 characters.
Many style guides for writing code maintain this limit of 80 characters as the maximum length of a line of code.
It is true that it is a limit that allows a more comfortable reading of the code on certain devices, but it is also true that it is a limit established almost a decade ago. At that time there was no technology that exists today and much less the screens with the diagonal that exist today.
To be more precise, this 80 character limit has its origin in the IBM punch cards used around 1928. These punch cards allowed to store data digitally, using perforations and used just 80 columns.
This little tutorial not only shows how to disable the vertical line of the Atom editor, but also demonstrates how simple it is to customize the appearance of its interface.
