An alternative icon for Atom.app

Atom is a hackable text editor for the 21st Century. It's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but its logo perpetuates a stereotypical misrepresentation of atomic structure.

Electrons don't travel in elliptical orbits around a nucleus: They move wildly and unpredictably in what's called an orbital, with a high probability of being close to the nucleus at any give time.

Paradoxially, atoms themselves are "smaller" than light, so they literally cannot be observed. As such, this could be described as an absurdist exercise. Forgive me.

For more info about atoms (the particle, not the editor), I recommend watching Introduction to the atom , a fascinating and newb-friendly video from Khan Academy.

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Use It

Open the terminal and execute:

curl https://github.com/zeke/atom-icon/raw/master/atom.icns \
  --location > /Applications/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/atom.icns

# all this junk clears the OS X icon cache:
sudo find /private/var/folders/ -name com.apple.dock.iconcache -exec rm {} \;
killall Dock
touch /Applications/Atom.app

Build It

OS X uses ICNS files. Use sips to convert the PNG:

sips -s format icns atom.png --out atom.icns