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Editor choices through the years?

Vincent Grovestine on April 08, 2019

First DEV post in a really (...really!) long time, but that's a story on its own for another time. During my morning skim of Twitter, I came acros...

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Thomas H Jones II • Apr 8 '19

Can't really remember what I used for coding before vi/vim. I started out with the native editors in Trash-80 mod I, II, III, then on the original Apple ][+, then something on an old Altos MPM sytem, then something on the original IBM PC. The last editor I used before vi would have been the REXX editor. Someone subsequently tried to poison me with Emacs, but I was able to shake it off.

And it still gives me the hives when I see people trying to write code in PICO/NANO.

Dian Fay • Apr 8 '19

the dawn of time: Windows Notepad, QBasic
~2000: Notepad++
2005: Visual Studio, Eclipse
2012: IntelliJ IDEA (still the best available option for Java imo)
2014: Sublime
2015: Atom
2016-present: NeoVim

Nicolas Grilly • Apr 13 '19

I'm curious about why have you left Sublime Text for Atom, and then Atom for NeoVim?

Dian Fay • Apr 14 '19

I checked out Atom on the recommendation of a colleague and liked it generally. Native plugin package management was a selling point too.

As for Vim/NeoVim, I had used it in server environments before but started defaulting to it to see whether minimizing mouse usage would be better on my wrist (it is). But in addition to that, normal mode navigation is much faster and more precise than shifting to arrow keys or mouse; I can use the same editor locally and remotely, and it integrates beautifully with command line tools like git or psql; and if I want exactly the same customizations and plugins on a server somewhere, all I have to do is ship my dotfiles up.