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Ben Halpern
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Which editor/IDE do you use and why?

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Toby Osbourn

Atom.

I used to use Vim exclusively but in an experiment to try new things decided to give Atom a go and really liked it.

The eco-system is strong and it gets out of my way as much as possible.

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Ben Halpern

Do you have a sense of the Atom ecosystem compared to Sublime? I have been using Atom too, but it will never be as performant as Sublime, so it needs to really have a much stronger ecosystem to be worth the tradeoff.

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Toby Osbourn

I used Sublime for a while before moving to Vim, but that was several years ago so can't speak to what it is like now, Atom's is at least as good as Sublime's was then.

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Joshua Bemenderfer

Atom here as well, the quality, flexibility and availability of packages for practically everything, as well as the low learning curve for making your own totally won me over. The sub-par startup speed has also become largely insignificant after I switched to an SSD.

Currently I have around 78 community packages installed. Might need to go through and cull that list sometime.

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Ben Halpern

Which packages would you recommend?

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Joshua Bemenderfer

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.

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Ben Halpern

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

Activate Turbo Mode

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Joshua Bemenderfer

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

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Darryl Norris

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.

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Ben Halpern

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

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Joshua Bemenderfer

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.

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Bogdan Bugarschi

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

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Jordi Riera

I am programming mainly in Python.

I used to use Vim for years. While vim is awesome, I needed an IDE to manage projects and more advanced features like relations between files or debugger. Pycharm is really at the top of the game for that. The debugger is doing charms.
Additionally, there is a vim mode to keep best of both worlds!

I did pass by sublime, but it is too close too Vim for me. The management of project wasn't good enough for me.

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Ben Halpern

Do you use the free or paid version of Pycharm?

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Jordi Riera

I did both.
After a year I switch to the paid version. The paid version gives some additional features like coverage, connection to database, templates languages like jinja2.
Worth features for my quest to a project manager IDE.

On top of it, other IDE from JetBrain are the same, was super easy for me to use Ruby, Go and C# based IDEs.

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Marcin K

In Sublime I use github.com/randy3k/ProjectManage
I can switch between projects in below second and manage a lot projects.

For python there is excellent damnwidget.github.io/anaconda/

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Promise Ogbonna

Vim emulation for VScode is not really there 😣

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Jeremy Gordon

ST2/3 and emacs key bindings (actually OS-wide) have treated me very well for a number of years. Linting for JS/python is easy to manage and relatively performant.

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Tony Morris

As a primarily .NET developer, I live within Visual Studio 2015 all day. Upgrading to 2017 this month, however. Work pays for the MSDN licensing.

For all other files, I use Sublime, basically because of inertia. I don't do anything special, but I love the packages. I played around with Atom, but it was way too slow back when I used it.

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Ben Halpern

Any thoughts about using Visual Studio Code for your "all other files" work? I'm not at all familiar with that ecosystem, but it kind of seems like VS Code is trying to be there for the kind of work you do with Sublime.

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Tony Morris

I'm not against VS Code. I tried it in the past and it didn't do anything that Sublime couldn't, so it's a hard shift for me. I think I'm up for a Sublime/Atom/Viscose face off in the new year. Stay tuned!

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testtestetstests

Atom.

That's what my friends use.

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Literallie

IntelliJ, because it does things I didn't even know an IDE could do. Also, full keyboard support!

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sabler

Atom. Nice, big edit space, plenty of toys you can add, and generally a great balance of no-nonsense and essential functionality.

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Mickaël Andrieu

PHPStorm, the best PHP IDE if you work with Symfony

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Jordi Riera

JetBrain IDEs are impressive!

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Andrew H. (Elycin)

PHPStorm/IDEA from Jetbrains - I don't know what I'd do without it's features.

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