Atom + Hydrogen nowacki.org

I have been using the Atom editor and its Hydrogen plugin for years for interactive data exploration and Python development. This combination is a core component of the work I do every day. News of Atom’s sunsetting was distressing. I started down the path of migrating to VS Code but found too many friction points in my current workflow. For now I’m going to continue using the last version of Atom.

Even before the sunset date, portions of Atom and its plugin ecosystem stopped working. Various package servers began shutting down, and Hydrogen no longer would start an ipython session within the editor as it used to. By following the instructions in this GitHub issue I was able to get Hydrogen working again.

  1. Download https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen/archive/refs/tags/v2.16.4.zip and unzip it in, say, your Downloads directory.
  2. Back up the old Hydrogen directory in your ~/.atom directory. First, quit Atom. Then, execute: cd ~/.atom/packages && mv Hydrogen ~/Desktop/Hydrogen.
  3. Copy the latest Hydrogen to the packages directory: cp -a ~/Downloads/hydrogen-2.16.4 Hydrogen
  4. Install the latest Hydrogen using apm: cd Hydrogen && apm install If you get a command not found error, you may need to install the command-line tools from within Atom (on a Mac, Atom -> Install Shell Commands)
  5. Start up Atom and you should have a functioning Atom + Hydrogen again.