What editor do you use?

[nexos]

Hello!
I personally love comparing code editors. I used to use Brackets, but then I switched to Atom, and then decided to use Visual Studio Code. Recently, however, I find myself using Emacs. Its really a great editor once you get the hang of it. I also kind of like Vim, but I find myself having to reach for the ESC key more then I would like, while Emacs, it all is there.

As for editors I don't like, I don't like IDEs. They force a build system, are full of bloat, and just aren't really my thing. One could say Emacs is bloated, and I agree with that, but I still like it better then Vim

What text editor do you use?

[BigBuda]

I use Geany. It's very light, has all that I need and is far from being bloated, it's extremely stable. It's really worth a try.

[klange]

Mine.



And I encourage anyone writing an OS to also write an editor - after all, every good OS needs a good editor.

And before someone asks, yes, I really do use my own editor as my daily driver and have done so for a few years now.

[nullplan]

I use vim for everything. Because vim exists for everything, and because unlike with Emacs, I don't have to break my fingers to get what I want. In all seriousness, when I started programming, I had a look around when I first started programming, and I saw that both Vim and Emacs were popular choices, both would require significant work to get into or to really get the most out of it, and I was only prepared to spend that effort once.

I've looked at other offerings like vscode, but IDEs are only for programming, and I do still kind of need an editor for config files and other text files. I don't know any programmer who uses Windows and does not have Notepad++ installed. So what's the point of having and IDE when you are still doing half your work in another program? So I use IDEs for compiling exclusively, and only if I must, and do all my editing with Vim.

[xenos]

I use vim for everything.

Same here, with a few plugins, like YouCompleteMe.

[neon]

Hi,

Primarily MSVC but am hoping to transition to a custom editor once everything else is in place. Am primarily working on utilities right now.

[Solar]

Vim, hands down, especially since I am hopping systems on a regular basis.

Windows / Git Bash, Linux, Raspbian, Termux, AmigaOS, Vim is there. From plain text to Perl to Amiga Installer scripts to LaTeX to C, C++ and C#, Vim is there with extensive support. It has all the powerful capabilities you could get from an IDE, and offers them to you wherever you are, be it as a plugin to IntelliJ / Rider / Visual Studio / Eclipse or in a SSH terminal connected to some machine at the other end of the world from your mobile. Not losing any work even if a line breaks down unexpectedly, integrated diff handling and multiwindow support are also a big plus.

Yes, the learning curve is steep, but it's well worth the climb because, as nullplan pointed out above, you only have to spend that effort once -- and being able to write and refactor code without your hands ever leaving the main keyboard area is something you can only really appreciate if you have experienced it.

Of course I have to disable the Vim plugin in the IDE whenever a coworker wants to take over the keyboard (e.g. in pair programming), but then I have to switch from US Intl layout back to German anyway.

[vvaltchev]

I believe vim is a great choice, for the reasons already pointed by others: it's powerful, lightweight and runs everywhere. I use it from time to time, but I never had the patience to learn it properly and make it my primary editor. Probably the thing that I most dislike about it, is the mode switching. I guess that between emacs and vim, from the usability point of view, I should be an emacs user, even if I'm actually not. Still, I'm thinking about seriously learning at least emacs.

Like it or not, I'm more into IDEs than into classic text editors, because of their better support for auto-completion and semantic navigation. Clearly, I could "survive" without that, or with a partial support for that, but it's not the same thing. A perfectly functioning intellisense, beats every other feature, for me. It's just too good to click on a function or a type and get immediately to its definition, even when plenty of compiler flags and #ifdefs are involved. For Tilck, I use CMake to export json files with the exact commands that are used to compile each translation unit so that VSCode can read them and allow intellisense to generate the same AST as the real compiler. I don't like much the fact that VSCode is not a native application, but I learned to accept that in exchange for its extra features. Also, it's completely free.

Unfortunately, for big enterprise projects or big open source projects like Linux, I have to forget about the perfect auto-completion and semantic navigation so.. VSCode is good as other editors like Sublime, Atom and non-gui ones like Vim and Emacs.

[AbleTheAbove]

I use a multitude of editors!


I use nano for single file terminal editing. (Eventually to be replaced by my own text editor)
I use atom for simple multifile projects.
VSCodium for multifile complex projects (Atom keybinds)
I dabble with vim/emacs occasionally.
I use Ox mainly on my piTop (3).
And recently I installed Amp to experiment with

[Kazinsal]

Visual Studio Code is my primary editor on any desktop platform. vim on servers if I need to do configuration changes. I tend to have about a half dozen Notepad windows open for jotting things down in, though.

[BigBuda]

Visual Studio Code is my primary editor on any desktop platform. vim on servers if I need to do configuration changes. I tend to have about a half dozen Notepad windows open for jotting things down in, though.

When remoting or on console, I rather use RHIDE or MCEdit for code, and Nano for config files.

[pvc]

It depends. I use different editors and IDEs for different purposes.

gedit for plain text, makefiles, shell scripts and reading from second display.
Vim, nano and mcedit for terminal.
QtCreator for C/C++.
VSCodium for Rust and C#. I liked MonoDevelop better, but it seems to be dead.
Eclipse for Java.
Notepad++ on Windows.
HxD for binaries on Windows.
Okteta for binaries on Linux.

[Qbyte]

I use nothing but Xed (the Gedit fork that's the default editor for Mint) for both coding and note writing. It's all I need and it will do me until I roll my own editor.

[linguofreak]

I used gedit in graphical sessions until it decayed past the point of intolerability, now I use Kate (my DE is a frankenstein, due to the consequences of MATE having forked GNOME, but not GTK. Though MATE is mostly still useable, GTK3 is pulling the whole GTK ecosystem into GNOME's death spiral. My session is launched as a KDE session, but uses both KDE and MATE panels, and mostly MATE apps. I had planned to do a complete switch to KDE, but found that the KDE panel didn't quite have everything I wanted, and in integrating mate-panel into my desktop, found that KDE will actually force GTK3 apps to respect the desktop color scheme, which not even MATE could do / bothered to do when it still used GTK2. I've even got things set up so that QT uses its GTK compatibility mode to render QT applications, so the KDE applications I do use, like Kate, look consistent with the GTK applications. GNOME2 is, in my opinion, the best DE that has so far existed, on any system, and my desktop behaves more like GNOME2 now that it has in nearly a decade).

But I digress...

In a terminal environment, I use mostly vim, but occasionally emacs.

When editing very large text files (such as saves for games that write their save files as human-readable text, often 10s of megabytes, when something stupid happens and I don't just want to revert to a previous save), I tend to use emacs-gtk. Most graphical editors choke on text files of such size, and even vim has trouble, but emacs does quite well. Actually, I think I found Kate does surprisingly well too, but it's been a while since I've had such a file open, so I forget what I used last time.

[eekee]

A tiny Forth block editor which, in my use cases, compares favourably to vi. In regular use, I use about 1/3 of the number of different commands I use in vi for perhaps 2/3 of the things I do in vi. It has some bugs and missing features, most especially regexps. I've imported my old, not-quite-comfortable file editor to my current Forth setup and I'm thinking about how to make it better. It shouldn't be hard to improve; I was very new to both Forth and making text editors when I made it.

For files, I use the vi editor from OpenWatcom, which is tolerable for a vi. It's a little behind vim in some editing features, but its classic windowing TUI means I don't have to dig through abstruse documentation to do basic stuff like switching between files. When I need to insert or remove newlines with a regexp substitution, I use a port of Sam. I would use Sam for everything, but I find its UI cumbersome and its text mode more so. Years ago I tried to make a different front-end for it, but found its code to be far beyond my skill. But anyway, I haven't felt the need to use anything better while most of my code is in blocks.

Incidentally, 9front's maintainer uses Sam.

I occasionally miss Acme which, although much smaller than Emacs or Vim, supports a very slick workflow for code editing, has the same powerful command language as Sam, and is fully scriptable in any language, subject to minor caveats. The catches are you need to be very comfortable with the mouse to use it and you really need to conform to its workflow rather than trying to make it fit yours.