A guide to write and push reStructuredText documentation to GitHub using only the Atom text editor. Here you will be using the Git-Plus Atom package, forking and cloning a documentation repo, and adding/committing/pushing some changes to GitHub.
Open Atom and go to Atom > Preferences. Once here you will see a tab menu on the left. Look for the tab labeled 'Packages' and click on it. Here you will see a list of all packages installed on your Atom editor. You can either scroll and look for the one labeled 'git-plus' or you can search for it with the search bar at the top. If you see it listed congratulations, you can move to the next step! If not you can go to my guide on how to set up your environment for this and then go to the next step.
In order to take another developers repo and make changes to it without affecting their master code, you first have to fork the repo. This basically makes a fresh copy of the master code from their repo and puts it in a repo on your account. So on this repo look at the top right of the page and you'll see a button labeled 'Fork', click this button and it will automatically fork the repo to your account. Now you can navigate to your repositories list and find the forked repo!
Go to your profile and click on 'Repositories', find and open the repo you just forked. On the right hand side you will see a green button labeled 'Clone or Download'. Click this button and a drop down with a link should appear. If you have your SSH key set up on GitHub then click the clipboard icon on the right to copy the link to your clipboard. Then open Terminal and cd to wherever you want the repo to live. Once there type:
$ git clone [email protected]:repo/link.git
Replacing the example link with the repo link you copied.
If you don't have your SSH key set up, then you need to press the download button and save the repo wherever you want it.
Now that you have the repo saved, open Atom and go to File > Add Project Folder. A new window should open with your finder. Navigate to where you saved the repo, highlight the repo folder and press open. Atom should pop up with your repo on the left side.
Once your repo is in Atom you can open it by clicking the arrow next to the name on the sidebar and click the Example.rst file. Once open follow the instructions to make your first reStructuredText file!
After all of the steps, save the file and you should notice on the sidebar that the color of the file name has changed. That means Git recognizes that the file is different than before and is telling you that you need to take action. Well lets take action, first press the shortcut keys command+shift+H and a new drop down should appear. In this window you will find all of the possible Git commands. First we need to add the file to the staging area so it can be committed and pushed. To add a file you simply press the shortcut keys and type 'Add' and press enter. A green message should pop up telling you it added the file to Git.
Now you need to commit the file so it can be forever known what was changed, when it was changed and why it was changed. To commit changes you press the same shortcut keys and type 'Commit' and press enter. You should see a new tab open asking for a commit message (this is a brief message telling every one else why you changed that), you type whatever you'd like and save the file, this should exit the tab and give you a success message.
The final step is to push the file to GitHub so every one in the world can see your code and all the reasons you changed your code. Press the shortcut keys and type 'Push' and press enter. This should either give you a success message or ask for GitHub username and password and then give you a success message. You should now be able to go to your GitHub account and see the files with the new changes!