Atom is one of my favorite tools. I use it for pretty much for anything that involves coding or writing(I’m writing this in Atom right now).

There are thousands of packages for Atom to expand its functionality. Atom is designed to be hackable by everyone to mold it to their own needs. So far, I have written three packages for Atom: They add syntax highlighting for the Motorola 6809 processor, the ARMIPS assembler, and my newest for the Intel 8080 processor.

I have a knack for assembly programming on old computers and hardware. Recently, I found an Altair 8800 emulator, downloaded the manual and started writing code for it. Hand assembling code on paper and entering it via toggle switches might sound crazy, but the result is very satisfying.

I even got a KIM Uno, a clone of the KIM-1(also seen as background image of this blog), another famous computer from the same time. And it uses the 6502, a very successful processor used in many later home computers and the NES. There is an Altair 8800 clone that looks fun, I might get one of those too.

But writing and translating all code by hand on paper can get tiring. So I thought about writing a package for Atom to take some of that work off me. There was no grammar package that added syntax highlighting for Intel 8080 assembly to Atom, so I wrote this one to have that.

I hope to expand this into some kind of a live assembler. The idea is to write the code in Atom and have it translated into machine code live by the editor as you type. I imagine it to look like the listing outputs some assemblers generate:

I’m not really fluent in JavaScript and the whole Node.js ecology, so this seems like a nice project to learn more about Atom, Electron and all that jazz.