A Peek At Strange Font Jumping In Atom

This post is actually about a super groovy piece of software I ran across called Peek which allows you record your screen as a gif. The reason I went looking for such a tool was to show off yet another strange behavior I am dealing with in Atom without having to do a video capture of my screen.

After upgrading Atom to 1.27.2 to resolve the font rendering issue that appeared after the release of Ubuntu 18.04 I have observed a peculiar behavior with jumping text. I cannot reliably reproduce this behavior, and it is not a usability issue as yet. I noticed it while the Markdown Preview window was open and I had selected some text to copy. I have no idea what the cause is at this time. My wild guess is that it has something to do with auto wrapping of the text. I am assuming it will resolve itself in a future release.

Again, the primary point of the post is to highlight Peek should you find yourself with a similar use case. For Ubuntu 18.04:

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/stable
2. sudo apt update
3. sudo apt install peek

Peek allows you to resize its window, adjust the frame rate, set up hotkeys for recording, delays for the start of recording, and a few more nifty options. The frame rate and scaling can have huge affects on the size of the file created. The gif I have embedded is somewhat large because I needed to set the frame rate quite high in order to come close to showing how quickly the text jumps on the screen.