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 (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.
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
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 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 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 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.
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 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
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.
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..