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.
Latest comments (48)
HomeSite, Notepad++, Eclipse, NetBeans, Sublime, Atom, VSCode.
I've probably worked with all major editors out there up until 2012 and at least gave a try to most of those that came out ever since.
It turns out that I have quite a simple heuristic:
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.
Phew.
I started with Notepad in the 90s, came over EditPad Lite and UltraEdit to Notepad++ not much later, tried GVim for a while, stuck with Sublime Text for a few years and finally made the switch to Emacs in 2012 which is where I still feel comfortable. I still have Sublime Text installed for certain regex things.
On servers, I usually have mg, joe or ed (yes, ed) ready, depending on what I want to edit and which server it is.
The problem is that I always feel like I'm missing something when I settle with one tool. I even gave Atom a chance just to find out that Webkit is a horrible code base for about anything. I tried Sam and I didn't understand it. I tried THE and it was disturbing. But at least I'm still believing that there is always a better way to solve all problems.
I wish I could like Vim, just for street credibility. But I don't.
I like Sublime text quite a lot. It's much faster than Atom or VSCode.
I like VSCode a lot because it has font ligatures.
I like VIM because it's super fast, and learning how to use it can be fun.
I also had a similar start. I currently love using VS Code.
I started with Python on Sublime text. Loved it's plugins and themes. Sometimes I would spend hours just setting it up.
Switched to Atom when I started learning web development. Saw it in a tutorial video and it looked beautiful. But it was too heavy for my laptop.
After an year or so of slow startup time of Atom, I tried out VS Code. Never looked back! Development experience has never been smoother.
Newer version of Atom have better startup times and I want to try it out now that I have upgraded my laptop. Maybe one day I'll reinstall Atom.
VSC > Atom > Sublime Text
Very interesting article, I've never thought about which code editor I prefer. In fact, I never stopped changing code editor because I change technology all the time !
I use IntelliJ in my current job because we are working with Spring MVC. It's a very cool IDE and I use it in my personnal project which use Java in backend. It's fast, simple and practical for developers.
But (yes, there is a but), I use Sublime Text to write Velocity code (template engine).
For my personal projects where the logic is writen with NodeJS, I use mostly Atom and VCS when I work with VueJS.
For the sysadmin part, I use nano because it's simple, fast and the shortcut are displayed natively (sorry Vim, I tried but I loose...).
So, I am not restricting myself with code editor that I prefer, I use the most adapted IDE for the situation ! :)
EDIT : some typos here and there...
My today's tools are Vim liteIDE (I'm doing coding in Go) and Kate. When I need to write some SQL/pgsql I take dBeaver and it does things pretty well.
Vim rocks forever.
When I need to change some things in my openwrt router (I've flashed openwrt myself to replace the stock firmware) I use it's embedded vi (through ssh).
My colleagues actively use VSC but I didn't touch it yet.
Thank you for the interesting story.
Talking about editors is like one of those uncomfortable dinner table conversations at your parent's house. :)
I like to give everything a fair shake before I settle on anything and as such, I came to pretty much the same conclusion as you; VSC, as it stands right now, is in a sweet spot for me. However, it could very easily turn into a bloated, steaming turd if it evolves (devolves) beyond its lightweight, humble roots. Time will tell.
As many have commented below, I am also a fan of Vim, and my choice of whether I use VSC or Vim boils down to what I am doing. If I'm working a lot from the command line and doing some quick scaffolding or changes, Vim works great for me. For nose-to-the-grindstone programming, I feel more comfortable in VSC. I imagine that if I really took the time to up my Vim game, and learned more about customizing and extending Vim, I would use it more because the inner-minimalist in me appreciates a tool that gets out of the way.
Thank you for sharing.
I used Notepad++ for my first intro to programming class in college, since it was just JS and the professor said we didn't need anything too fancy to build our small assignments. Used Netbeans for the classes that used Java and Emacs on the command line for my C++ classes. Also had one mobile app class where I used Android Studio. My first web dev job, I mostly used Textmate, except for the few weeks I used XCode to experiment with a couple concepts on iOS, but when I got my current job I started using Atom. I switched to a different team at the end of last year, where my new tech lead was using VS Code. I loved Atom but I liked the Git integration and several other features, so I tried it for a week, found I preferred it to Atom, and have been using it since.
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
Similarily, as you: Notepad++, Sublime Text 2, Sublime Text 3 (paying user on both). But as of last 6 months I'm a VSC convert as well.
Jetbrains IDE are best code editor atm.. beautifull, customizable..