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.
Oldest comments (47)
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.
Didn't try that but seems pretty pragmatic and reviewers love it. I'm going to leave it for practice later :)
Vim for me too. After learning it and installing a couple of modules it becomes very powerful and easy to use.
That's a quite bad reason. If you're feeling ok with it that's good, but maybe you're missing out.
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.
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 used Notepad++ for a long time. Before that I was using Notepad and having to remember to set the right text encoding so it would work on the server!
I moved to Comodo Edit when I ditched Windows. Komodo Edit has a lot of really cool tricks, but even on a modern laptop with 16gb of ram I found it would slow down and get glitchy sometimes.
Earlier this year it started crashing and causing problems. I followed the bug hunt on github for a while, but my patience grew short so I went to Atom. Atom is missing a few features compared to Komodo, but is much more stable. And I find the uncluttered interface easier to work with.
I may go back to Komodo someday. It's the editor I've used the longest (outside of VIM). But they need to re-architect or something. When one of their own guys admits it will slow down over time if you have multiple tabs open, that is bad.
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!
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 mainly use VSCode, but occasionally find even that's overkill when I just need to open and edit just one file, or even just copy and paste something. For that I use TextWrangler just to have a quick thing load, though even that's starting to show its age and bloat. On Windows I'd use Notepad++, but Mac has a bit of a hole there. TextEdit isn't powerful enough, VSC is too much and TextWrangler is just slow. Still looking!
I started with Notepad (yes the windows one) in 2001, then I switched to Notepad++ in 2003, used that until 2010. In 2010 I bought a MacBook Pro and with that eventually switched to
OS XmacOS, I bought Coda and used it until they released Coda 2, which “didn't feel right any more“ and overall it was fucking laggy (at least on my machine). I decided to teach myself emacs.Then I was lucky enough to receive a beta key for GitHub's product, which I now mainly use for projects connected to github, especially, since they started to implement GitHub further into the Editor. :)
For everything else I'm still using emacs and no, I'm not having carpal tunnels. :P
My first editor/IDE was Norton Commander Editor! Then I moved to Visual Basic 4... Visual Basic editor had really great stuff for that time, like code completion, debugging tools, documentation integrated, code generation and many other features (visual forms edition).
For ASP development I just used Windows Notepad.
After a dark era working with .NET (ASP/VB/C#) I move to C/C++, Java and PHP so I try from KDevelop to Eclipse passing through old Zend Studio (not the Eclipse version).
Nowadays I use VSCode for Node, PHP, and basic scripting like bash or dockerfile/docker-compose.
Android Studio (Intelli J) for Android development, and XCode for iOS as they are the easier/fastest way to get into development.
And last but not least VIM for a simple editing in command line while doing something else.
Dear God, Norton! You must have all white hair xD (kidding)
Was it hard to code in Norton? I'm asking because of your change to VB4..
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 wrote down the simple things I want in a text editor and surprisingly it's a hard combination to find. Too many editors are focused on bells-and-whistles and fail to provide basic functionality.
I'm coding (or at least trying to) since 2013 and didn't find a perfect option. Looking your article, I guess this going take a while :thinkingemoji:
Talking about one's first code editor, does anybody here remember the Brief editor?