Discussion on: Which editor/IDE do you use and why?

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Replies for: Atom here as well, the quality, flexibility and availability of packages for practically everything, as well as the low learning curve for making y...

Ben Halpern • Jan 1 '17

Which packages would you recommend?

Bogdan Bugarschi • Jan 3 '17

proton-mode is really nice if you're into emacs+vim but can't be bothered to learn either :)

Joshua Bemenderfer • Jan 2 '17

mumbles incoherently about having to do anything on New Years Day

aligner - Align text in customiseable ways with support for lots of filetypes.
All the linters
autocomplete-modules - Autocomplete require/import statements.
browser-plus - A bit glitchy, but an embedded browser. With HMR or livereload, it makes it really easy to develop webapps in one window.
color-picker - Inline color picker, really great for CSS work, but works with a variety of color formats. I contributed to it a bit.
pigments - Highlights color values in text with the color they represent. Works with CSS preprocessors as well.
colorful-json - Makes reading JSON a tiny bit easier. double-tag - Keeps HTML opening and closing tags in sync when editing them.
git-time-machine - Visually interact with git commit history for a file.
imdone-atom - Turns TODOs and FIXMEs into a kanban-board style interface. minimap - Because minimap.
platformio-ide-terminal - A pretty good embedded terminal.
project-manager - Makes it easy to load and switch between projects.
regex-railroad-diagram - Visual display of regexes as a railroad diagram. Really helps avoid trial-and-error.
wakatime - For when you want to know all your code statistics.

And probably a few more.

Ben Halpern • Jan 2 '17

Great list, you rock, Joshua! I use a few of these. I'm not sure how I could survive without color-picker.

Of course, the only truly necessary Atom package is Activate Power Mode

Joshua Bemenderfer • Jan 2 '17

Indeed, color picker, especially combined with pigments, is awesome.

Ah yes, activate-power-mode. Sometimes I use that when I'm feeling really demotivated. It works wonders.

Great topic idea by the way, thanks! It's nice to see what everyone else's setups are, so that I can steal ideas for mine. xD

Darryl Norris • Jan 2 '17

I used to use Atom as my primary editor. However, I have experience that if you use many packages the editor can get very very slow. Also, editing huge files can take forever processing. For instance there is a file that have over 10k lines of code and I click return and it takes 5 - 10 seconds before the editor response.

For these reason, I have it installed as vanilla and use it for quick/simple editing.

Ben Halpern • Jan 2 '17

Yes, that can be very frustrating. Sometimes I'll accidentally click on a huge file from the drawer and the whole editor just freezes.

Joshua Bemenderfer • Jan 2 '17

Aye, that can indeed be a pain. That said, I haven't had much need to open large files, and in my experience it's not slow with those unless it's doing syntax highlighting on them.