Not able to connect to atom.io for themes and packages

Question

I believe my work proxy is preventing me from being able to add themes and packages to Atom. From the preferences menu, I get:

Fetching featured packages and themes fai

Answer 1

Atom will use your shell's proxy variables (like $https_proxy) if you start Atom from a shell that has these variables set. You need to have the Atom command line tools installed for that to work.

From a shell, you can simply type atom to open the editor for the current directory. It will use all environment variables from this shell, including the proxy variables.

I find this a lot easier than setting the variables in the config file.