My first love
I'm a student and as such, I'm always looking for what's best for learning. The first time I wrote .html, I used Notepad++, great and small but very powerful editor. I really love it but has limitations. So why I used it? Because my notebook was a Sony Vaio Win7-Starter 32-bits with 2GB RAM. Power wasn't a great stuff and Notepad++ was the perfect option.
My second love (and the lover)
Eventually, I moved on to a bigger laptop and instead of looking for the old code editor, I was making a course in Coursera and saw the instructor used Sublime Text. I downloaded and loved it. Beautiful and light, what a powerful combination! I said to myself, still love it.
Later that year, when I sign up at Github something called my attention: a code editor made by Github team, let's give it a try I said and it was so beautiful, I was willing to forget Sublime and move on with my life. I'm still running Atom for certain projects directly related to Github but, again life is strange and I switched again.
My current(s) Code Editor(s)
I started FreeCodeCamp and saw this show -Daily Programming- where the developer worked in some kind of cool themes and where I fall in love with Atom was in those times. My love with Atom was certain, secure, rock solid...or that was my thoughts.
I started to talk beautiful things about Atom and how cool was to work with it until a friend appears from nowhere and introduce in my life Visual Studio Code. Don't get me wrong, I love Atom and Notepad++ (yes, not so fan of Sublime, sorry not sorry) but VSC is a thing from another world. I really (REALLY) like to work with it and is lighter than Atom and have all the cool stuff Atom has and...I can't decide until today which one is my code editor.
Decide what's the best thing for you
Until today, I don't know what is going to be my last choice but one thing is certain: you have to decide what's best for you, regardless what people and reviewers and YouTubers and other devs tell you. This is not a direct advice from me, it's an opinion built with many errors and bugs. The most secure thing is that I'm mistaken.
Top comments (48)
IDE days
Started with eclipse, felt bulky and slow. Switched to qtcreator, which worked quite well for a while, but still felt like overkill.
Lightening up
Then I switched to lighter editors. First came sublime, then atom. Sublime was nice. Atom was like a slow Sublime. Neither were thrilling, but both were better than Notepad++, which is what people were recommending.
Magic editors
Then, in my second year of undergrad in university, I saw my professor using vim effectively. It looked like magic. There were so few keys involved, with the ability to do so much. It was beautiful. So, I sat down and learned vim.
Then I started my masters. My supervisor is on the emacs side of the vim-emacs religious war. He showed me may interesting features with emacs, and it too had the appearance of magic. So I learned/configured emacs to my liking.
Now, I use both vim and emacs simultaneously. A lot of the packages in emacs are better written and are more efficient, but I prefer the vim workflow. For my research, nothing can replace org-mode. You can write your ideas, implement the sql queries, r functions, or python snippets, directly in your document, and have the results output directly into the document too. It's like an ipython notebook, for any language. It's really a great setup for that purpose.
I hate the navigation in emacs. Moving characters and words is fine, but moving between window panes is a nightmare. For my bigger/multifile projects, I like to use vim + tmux, which are also integrated into my window manager. So, the continuity of my setup is vim-centric, so it feels better than emacs.
So, basically, vim and emacs, almost equally.
I've been doing small CS problems when I realized the IDE was an overkill. Switched to Vim because all the cool kids were doing it. Three years later, I still use it for practically all of my web apps.
That's a quite bad reason. If you're feeling ok with it that's good, but maybe you're missing out.
Okay, it's just about a week now. Today I switched back to Vim.
VS Code is a good editor, but it didn't give me anything a terminal couldn't give. And I really missed the close integration with my terminal.
That said, that was an interesting experience, thank you for the idea.
I know! :D
I've actually tried other editors, but I don't feel like I've given them enough time. Today I'm going to setup the VS Code and use it for a week or two just to see if things will become easier to me.
Vim for me too. After learning it and installing a couple of modules it becomes very powerful and easy to use.
Didn't try that but seems pretty pragmatic and reviewers love it. I'm going to leave it for practice later :)
In school was forced to use Adobe dreamweaver. Then found out about sublime and been using it for about 5 years. The last year been using it with vim emulator and about 6 month ago switched to vanilla vim and happy with it
A friend told me to use in my Vaio (mentioned in the post) the DreamWeaver. Being noob as I was, I did it. I think that made me hate so much AD although it's a good tool to work with.
I think it gave me a lot of dislike towards trying to fit to much into a single application. That is why after using it I leaned towards very plain editors which just do one job and do it well. However, I have not opened AD in many years at this point so it might be worth a shot to see how things progressed since
I swear to god, I used to change text editors like I did clothes.
My perfect code editor journey:
---- ONE MONTH LATER ----
And I've been using VSC ever since. I love it.
As a CS Freshman in the mid 1990s, I used the department lab with Solaris x86 machines and it's default editor,
emacs, once or twice, but the problem I'm hearing aboutvimthese days -- how do you get out of it? -- hit me, and I mostly closed the window and logged off.But the learning labs were campus-provided, running real Solaris machines and CDE and was taught
vi. Later, working as a student, I began to learn all sorts of additions and customizations to make it work for me.First job out of school was in a Windows-centric environment, and we used
UltraEdit, which introduced me to column-editing. It was a very nice editor and I think it's still available.But it wasn't Free or free. In my next (and current) job, a staff position at a university, I started switching between
vimon Linux and ActiveState'sKomodo Edit(free not Free) on Windows and Linux. I could mount remote file systems and edit from Linux, and open new files by typingkomodo file.txtat a bash prompt.But later, I tried and eventually bought
Sublime Text 2, which was my main editor for some time.atomdrew me away, with similar style and customization. Right now, I am likingVisual Studio Code, but there are features I miss, like printing (yeah, but sometimes I like to print, read, and plan, rather than diving in without a plan and hacking around), and sorting lines. When I need sorting, or want to edit a file on a remote machine, I go back tovim.I started with Sublime when I first started to learn how to code. I checked out Atom a year later and switched back to Sublime a couple of days later because it was pretty slow compared to Sublime at the time. I tried out Brackets and didn't like it either. I tried Visual Studio the other day but it didn't seem all that, so I just went back to Sublime. :-)
Sincerely,
A Sublime User
I have been working on MS stack for last six years and the only IDE available to me till now was Visual Studio, and can't complain because it's a damn powerful IDE.
But with release of dot net core I now have an option of working in VS code but enterprise apps need Visual Studio, but VS Code by no means is less powerful and the pox I have done so far in VS code have made me love it as an go to open source editor.
Also I just can't get enough of themes and icons provided in it.
I started out using Nick Bradbury's Homesite in 1995 (which was later acquired by Allaire, Macromedia and Adobe Systems.) It was last updated in 2003 and I used it until a couple months ago due to lack of Win10 support and outdated HTML support.
I also use NotePad++ and have evaluated Sublime, Atom, Eclipse, Brackets and Code. Many of them require you to create a "project" prior to editing any files... or you can't even type into an editor without first saving a file. Many editors also lacked flexible FTP access that I had grown accustomed to in Homesite.
I've since switched over to UltraEdit and I really like it. It's extremely customizable and I've been able to remap many hotkeys that I've grown accustomed to over the years, so I didn't have to fully reeducate myself to learn new key combinations. It's also portable which enables me to take a copy of my configured editor with me on-the-go.
I started my career using Brief! Brief worked really well for coding if and only if you had a keyboard with the function keys in two columns on the left side. Once keyboard layouts with function keys along the top were standard, Brief was no longer the king of the mountain. I used traditional command-line "vi" for years and years and still go back to it for some tasks where it excels. Sublime Text was my favorite editor for the last 2-3 years, but like you, I just discovered Atom and it works well with the Particle Electron build system. I haven't yet figured out the auto-code formatting with Atom like I could do with Sublime. I'm downloading the Visual Studio Code right now and will give it a try. My main computer runs Linux - Ubuntu 17.04.
I started out with the classic notepad, I remember typing an entire page HTML calculator or something of that sort in it. Then tried sublime,atom didn't stick to any of those either. As a text editor my goto editor is vim until the recent advent of Visual Studio Code.
Vim on console, VSC for others and Vim Bindings everywhere!