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Discussion on: Which editor/IDE do you use and why?

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nickcraver profile image
Nick Craver

I rarely switch, a given task usually stays within an editor. As far as different behavior between editors, I find most of them behave the same in terms of command access...except when changing between Windows and macOS. I've hidden VS Code with Ctrl+Shift+H so, so many times.

I find that the very small and fast mental cost of choosing the editor up front is the main mental switch involved. After that the features are just better for the scenario. For example, the file tree (with vscode-icons) is far better in VS Code than Sublime (IMO). Visual Studio doesn't even show a file tree, it's a solution tree. It has an open directory mode in 2017, but it's far slower to start up and generally it's not worth the cost for whatever task I'm trying to do in such a scenario.

Visual Studio is also not as versatile for multi-lingual setups - and I'm hopping around many systems in my role at Stack. For example when I'm doing Puppet, network configs, DNS, Node.js, Go, etc. VS Code just works...and works pretty well. Since you can define build actions in the repo, it's very easy to have one editor where "building" does what you want across so many things. Extremely handy quick editor.

Contrast that with "I just want to take a note" or "I just want to edit one file" - you want to minimize your overhead which (by a much larger percentage) is now startup cost. Sublime 3 wins there, by a huge margin. It's also one window pane rather than many. It's simply optimized for it all around. Note: you can open a directory in Sublime, but it's pretty raw and just a directory browser in the left pane. But, you can open several if that suits your workflow.

This is just additional reasoning and examples of why I choose the editor I do for the scenarios listed in my post above. Hopefully that better explains the upfront context switch decision, in order to avoid many more down the road.

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pim profile image
Pim

Thumbs up x 100000 on this. I work in entirely same fashion, with perhaps a slightly strong emphasis on Visual Studio.