6 ms·

Poll: Which text editor do you use daily?

151 points by methoddk 15y ago

Do you use an IDE, vim, emacs, gasp maybe even Notepad? I'm partial to vim, but wondering what everyone else uses on a daily basis, maybe even comment why? Ease of use? Syntax completion? etc...

waleedka 15y ago
Komodo Edit.
- justauser 15y ago
  Another user here. Please add Komodo IDE/Edit.
- methoddk 15y ago
  added, thanks.
- nirai 15y ago
  +1
spdy 15y ago
Why did you not split up the IDE part ? To Sublime Text 2 / Textmate / Eclipse / Visual Studio etc.
- methoddk 15y ago
  I've added those now, thanks for the tip.
methoddk 15y ago
Seems like a few people like Sublime Text 2 Any particular reasons why? I currently use MacVim with solarize dark color palette.
- stravid 15y ago
  It's fast and works. Since discovering it two years ago I still haven't found a reason to switch.
  - mds101 15y ago
    In addition it is very actively developed and updates flow in often. Also has quite a large number of useful plugins.
- bluishgreen 15y ago
  Before Sublime I was using emacs. Sublime Text 2 is really well done. You have to try it to understand. If you want a characterization, I would call it the balsamiq of text editors.
- MaxGabriel 15y ago
  Most of my decisions are pretty forced. I don't use Eclipse or Gedit because they were crashing my computer. I don't want to spend time learning vim, and am skeptical of it because I read bad things about modes in UI books. For me sublime text 2 just got the basics right: black background, tabs, text completion, no crashes. The only feature I really appreciate that seems unusual are the pinstripes denoting tab characters
  - roryokane 15y ago
    I don't have a problem with Vim's main modes, because I always know what mode I am in. Not only is the name of the current mode always in the bottom-left of the window, the cursor also looks different depending on whether I am Insert mode (vertical line) or Normal mode (rectangle). I suspect that your UI books warned against modes where the user might forget what mode they are in. However, you also go into another mode when you enter the beginning of a multi-key shortcut (such as 'ma' to mark the current location with label 'a'). This is indicated at the bottom-right of the window by showing the keys you have typed so far (such as 'm'). Since that is the only indicator, sometimes I have accidentally forgotten I was in this mode. So that can be a problem. But it's easy to undo mistakes - just press 'u' in Normal mode, or Ctrl-O if the effect was moving the cursor. And if I know I'm in some weird mode and just want to get out, I can just mash Esc, and that always brings me safely back to Normal mode. Of course, the reason Vim has modes in the first place is to give modifier-key-less ways to access a lot of functionality. I think the modes are overall a good thing. It's very nice to be able to edit and rearrange text with so few keystrokes and no need to move your hand to the mouse. But configuring Vim so it works well can be a large pain. I've been using public computers to program a lot recently, so I've been using Sublime Text 2 on those, because of its good defaults and cross-platform nature. I hope to soon upload my Vim configuration files online so I can use it on other computers, but first I have a bunch of bugs in my configuration I have to fix. That's where I envy Emacs for having a good configuration language.
  - read_wharf 15y ago
    "I read bad things about modes in UI books." This makes me skeptical of UI books.
- Pewpewarrows 15y ago
  It took me five years (and counting) to get Vim to a place where I'm happy with how it looks and functions. ST2 gives me that out-of-the-box, and it's improving constantly.
  - wonderzombie 15y ago
    I switched from Vim to ST2 two days ago, and this was precisely why. At the risk of repeating what you wrote above: strictly speaking, Sublime Text 2 doesn't do anything you couldn't do with Vim, either by installing multiple plugins or writing your own plugin. The difference is that most of the plugins I installed in Vim are features which just work in ST2. I can't _believe_ I went this long without a robust "find in files" or a project system. Also, in the ~10 or so years I've used Vim, I've _never_ learned its specialized scripting language. Every time I've tried, I've given up in frustration. You can use another language but you can never truly escape vimscript. ST2 plugins are written in Python.
- frou_dh 15y ago
  It's tastefully designed in every sense, from the look to the feature set to the extensibility. The one thing I'm not keen on is its reuse of actual TextMate bundles. I definitely understand why it was done, but some of the bundles seem a bit legacy and they all use gnarly XML.
- Rayne 15y ago
  The only reason I don't use ST2 is because it isn't nearly as good as Vim at indenting and highlighting the languages I use. Another reason would be that I can't use it in a terminal and would have to switch to another editor. But the rest of ST2 is utterly fantastic. In particular, using Python as the extension language. Elisp is okay, but VimL is terrible. ST2 is the only popular editor I'm aware of that has a real programming language as its extension language and not a editor-specific language.
- Geee 15y ago
  For me the most important feature is the quick file finder / browser / preview whatever that is called (cmd/ctrl+P), along with the ability to save folders as projects. Everything else is really nice too, but that is definitely the feature that sold it for me.
- ohhmaagawd 15y ago
  Sublime is great in general. One area it lacks is good auto-formatting support (it has the feature, but it generally fails) I use this feature all the time in JetBrains IDEs and it's tough to live w/out once you are used to it.
- losvedir 15y ago
  I was a MacVim user before switching to ST2. It looks nice (shouldn't matter, I guess, but it does to me a bit). For example, scrolling is much smoother and easier for my eyes to track and keep my place -- MacVim only lets you scroll complete line by complete line which is kind of jumpy. The folder hierarchy in the sidebar is better integrated. Open a new ST2 window, go Project -> Add Folder to Project, and then all its subfolders and files will be easily browseable. It's not always necessary, though, because the fuzzy file finder search is so good. (Like Command T, but built-in). Multiple cursors. I use this more than I would have thought. You can command-click and get multiple cursors, or you can highlight a word and command-d to incrementally highlight each further instance. Then, you can type and it goes to all the cursors simultaneously. If you, say, shift-opt-left arrow, it will highlight the word to the left, and then you can copy, and it will copy every word but associated to its particular cursor, so you can then hit command-right arrow to go to the end of the line, and then paste each of the copied words. So, say, I want three similar json objects, one related to cats, one dogs, and one birds. (This is a contrived example, and probably not the best way to do it, but just to demonstrate the power here.) Now what I'd do is I'd write on three separate lines, "cat", "dog", and "bird". Then, I'd highlight each of them to get multiple cursors, hit cmd-c so I have "cat", "dog", and "bird" copied for each cursor, and then just write the json object and all three would be done at the same time. If I wanted a variable to be called "myAnimal", then I could paste (so, I'd get the three animals). Opt-shift-left arrow to highlight them, command-p (which brings up the fuzzy-finder for all of sublime's functionality), type "capt", which will bring up "Capitalize", hit enter to do so. (Now I have "Cat", "Dog", and "Bird"). Then opt-left arrow to go to the beginning of the word, and type "my", and now I have "myCat", "myDog", and "myBird". I'm not sure how well that came across, but basically multiple cursors is a killer feature that I didn't have in Vim. Couple that with a powerful macro system of recording keystrokes, and then using those macros with the multiple cursors, you can do a lot of editing fast.
adjwilli 15y ago
TextWrangler (BBEdit when my company paid for it)
erd 15y ago
You might want to toss RubyMine and IntelliJ on the list.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
Vim for whenever I'm running something headless or I'm ssh'ed into a server somewhere. Eclipse for any project that's an excessive amount of Java, which at this point is only Android apps. XCode for any project that's an excessive amount of Objective-C, so just iOS or OS X apps. Visual Studio / MonoDevelop for anything that's going to be published to a Microsoft environment (Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, or Unity cross-platform development). Sublime Text 2 with Vintage mode for everything else. I'd love to just use one editor for everything, but the language IDEs (Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio) are too good in terms of intellisense and platform integration to pass up for their respective languages. It's a pain in the ass juggling contexts, especially with vastly different keybinds in various editors, but it's definitely worth the pain when you're on a roll with something.
- methoddk 15y ago
  I'm the same way, I really love vim for python, ruby, html. But I've been eyeing up Sublime Text 2... It looks nice
  - kisom 15y ago
    What sold me on ST2 was the Package Control (http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control) and the fact it works on my Linux box and Macbook. Generally ST2, with Aquamacs + SLIME for Clojure and Common Lisp and vim on console because my fingers are hard-wired to it (I've been using it for almost a decade).
    - aiscott 15y ago
      I was pretty excited about sublime text 2, and I use it on my Mac and windows box. But I can't use it on our work cluster due to it not supporting our version of rhel (5 I think)
- skrebbel 15y ago
  > I'd love to just use one editor for everything, but the language IDEs (Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio) are too good in terms of intellisense and platform integration to pass up for their respective languages. It's a pain in the ass juggling contexts, especially with vastly different keybinds in various editors, but it's definitely worth the pain when you're on a roll with something. That. The religious text-editor wars really hurt the discussion when language-IDE-platform combinations exist that really boost productivity and maintainability. In the same way, though, it makes little sense coding Python in Visual Studio. Makes me wonder if all the "My editor simply is best" people can code in more than a language and a half.
x5315 15y ago
Why isn't TextMate on the list?
- methoddk 15y ago
  added
ZenDan 15y ago
Vim because it's lightweight, fast, and the vast plugins that are available makes it almost like an IDE
rsandhu 15y ago
textmate should be on this list
eshvk 15y ago
Vim for almost all coding (except for Java: I still use vim for rolling out tiny programs but since eclim, the Vim plugin for eclipse is not very good, I am forced to use eclipse). I use emacs in vim-mode as a GTD planner, mainly because org-mode is an incredibly useful planning tool that I am able to use on any machine that is linked to my dropbox account as long as I know the markup.
- writetoalok 15y ago
  I have wondered more than a few times, what it would take to port org-mode to Vim ... I note that someone gave up on the slime port of vim for various reasons ...
  - aerique 15y ago
    AFAIK Slimv is being actively developed and quite usable (although I haven't used it myself): http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531 Also wrt org-mode: if one called out to Emacs from Vim for exporting to different formats it shouldn't be too much work.
- eshvk 15y ago
  Forgot to add: One another situation where I would use emacs is if ever I really got into R. ess (emacs speaks statistics) is quite good compared to vim equivalents.
rachelbythebay 15y ago
nano or pico, depending on what's installed
kooshball 15y ago
where's notepad/wordpad? I use it all the time on windows servers that dont have notepad++ installed.
eccp 15y ago
I mostly use Emacs for development. Vim for small edits on the console, sometimes I open gEdit to read plain text files when I'm not coding. On Windows (under Virtualbox or on remote servers) I tend to use Noteapad++. I don't use much Eclipse these days except for a few touches to an Android project.
pandemicsyn 15y ago
vim most of the time but end up switching to Chocolatapp if its html/js for Flask.
barumrho 15y ago
I use XCode for iOS development and Vim for everything else. Tried to use Vim for iOS development as well, but XCode has incomparable integration of code completion, compiler, etc. (Even though it is slow and buggy.) I am open to using other editors/IDE if they came with better code completion and integration for Web related technologies, but I have not found one that outweighs the benefit of using Vim.
namzo 15y ago
On windows, it used to be Notepad++ but since I moved to mac, I've been using textmate. I wish there was Notepad++ for mac.
- methoddk 15y ago
  Check out TextWrangler. Pretty similar
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  ST2 gets you most of the missing features, like bracket matching, sane indenting etc.
evincarofautumn 15y ago
Emacs: familiar, useful, widely preinstalled, and uniform across Linux, Windows, and Unix. Notepad++: minimal without being irritatingly underpowered like its ++-less namesake, plus Scintilla is nice.
saryant 15y ago
MacVim with the Janus additions. https://github.com/carlhuda/janus https://github.com/carlhuda/janus I always catch myself trying to use Vim bindings in non-Vim environments. I would pay serious money for software that would allow me to work like that in every Max OS textbox.
- aiscott 15y ago
  I agree. Emacs type key bindings are prevalent in osx, sad to see vim missing. Although I was so happy to learn c-d was delete in cocoa boxes, especially since that is easier to type than fn-delete. I mostly use emacs these days, but still use vim too. To keep my brain from scrambling, I changed emacs movement keys to match vim (ie c-h, c-j, c-k, c-m).
- jergason 15y ago
  FYI, you can set bash to vi mode with `set keymap vi && set -o vi`.
- snth 15y ago
  Well, there's this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/ if you're using Firefox.
- erikcw 15y ago
  I use Quickcursor -- you just setup a global hotkey and it will open the contents of any text widget in the editor of your choice. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor
pknerd 15y ago
No Netbeans???? ++1 for Netbeans!
terhechte 15y ago
I'm currently using Xcode for everything iOS / OSX (most of my work actually) and am going back and forth between Vim and Sublime for everything else. I've been using Vim for years and Sublime really shines in some regards. However, it lacks some plugins that I really like about Vim (like EasyMotion https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion) which is why I'm deciding on a project basis which editor to use. (Also, I really like to be able to browse for files without having to reach for the mouse). Btw. In that regard, I find it fantastic that the Vim bindings start to become some sort of unofficial text editor control standard; more and more editors are adding Vim bindings (like http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ it has a Vim Plugin too).
- Deinumite 15y ago
  I think vintage mode in sublime text 2 offers vim like keybindings as well. As for browsing for files using the keyboard, I'm a huge fan of Command-T. https://github.com/wincent/Command-T https://github.com/wincent/Command-T
methoddk 15y ago
At the moment, vim is a runaway victor as far as popularity. As I expected it to be. Insanely simple and so many great plugins.
WiseWeasel 15y ago
Dreamweaver as a fancy text editor. /ducks
- nocipher 15y ago
  When I first started doing web programming at my first real programming job, everyone there used Dreamweaver as the IDE of choice. I used it for a few months before I could no longer deal with its idiosyncrasies. Now, I absolutely hate the program. It got to the point that I would only use Dreamweaver for remote file management (silly, I know, but I was still learning) and would open the files in emacs for actual editing. Eventually, I stopped using it all together and forced myself to find other ways to retrieve remote files. In retrospect, I should have set up a source control repository and left the programming team a little better than I found it. Hindsight is 20-20.
mesdeparts 15y ago
Where is gedit?
whateverer 15y ago
Gedit is the one I use most. Really, why would I need more for daily use? I wouldn't bother pasting stuff or taking simple notes with Vim, Emacs or even the specialized apps for that. I can read text files from the file browser with that, and for my other viewing need I have less. When I program, it's usually Emacs, otherwise Eclipse for Java.
- freehunter 15y ago
  I use Notepad for this same reason. It's so easy to just hit win -> r - > 'notepad' on my XP laptop at work. Anything I need a text editor for, Notepad fits the bill. When it comes time to start coding, then I move to an IDE. No need to get fancy.
  - bsoist 15y ago
    I just hit win -> r -> 'vim' when I'm using Windows.
DotSauce 15y ago
Noted since '01: http://software.iamcal.com/noted/ http://software.iamcal.com/noted/
kaerast 15y ago
Vim when I want to quickly edit a file Geany for writing longer scripts RubyMine for Ruby development (mostly Chef cookbooks these days)
hsmyers 15y ago
emacs in Unix. EditPlus in Windows. If I'm in a hurry in Unix, I'll use gedit depending on the distro...
- gautaml 15y ago
  +1 for EditPlus!
- sebastianavina 15y ago
  When I was at middle school, when I was just a beginner, I had the problem of not having a nice and more advanced notepad. I spent a while until I found editplus, after that I, experimented with a lot of text editors unsuccsesfully. Once in a while, while googling "great text editor" saw something about those strange linux text editors. Crazy people, I thought. Under editplus I learned about regular expressions and a bunch of things. Funny enough the first thing I made when installed linux for the first time was to install ediplus under Wine. Just some time later when I learned about emacs I really understood the programmers world. Still editplus is the best editor for windows I have ever found. I have some "util" apps I use since who knows when under Windows: SqlYog, Editplus, LeechFTP, Putty, StartupCPL (http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml), hdclone. It's funny to see how much easy is the world for a developer under linux. Util apps simply doesn't exist. Just some commands that may not come by default on your distro.
DodgyEggplant 15y ago
Wing IDE
gburt 15y ago
vim on the command line, TextWrangler in the UI. I find its nice to have TextWrangler open with my todo.txt and bills.txt files, and is also nice to be able to quickly throw in little hacks / debug code / etc., but for "real editing" vim all the way.
- xymostech 15y ago
  Have you tried using MacVim before? It provides a fairly nice UI for editing files but with the full vim interface/keybindings, and uses all your .vimrc files as well.
luriel 15y ago
ed, acme ( http://acme.cat-v.org http://acme.cat-v.org ), vi. For quick one-off edits, still nothing can beat ed. Acme is great for working with many files. And vi is the last resort for environments where acme is not practical. Of course, this days real men use sam, but I'm too spoiled to give up Acme and mouse chording.
- 4ad 15y ago
  I remember there's a chording patch for sam.
  - luriel 15y ago
    I know there have been several chording patches for sam, but I don't think any of them work reliably.
tikhonj 15y ago
I use Emacs because it does everything, most of it well, and is absurdly easy to extend. I've found myself missing features several times; each time, it took maybe three or four lines of code and maybe ten minutes to add. Even adding basic support for a new language turned out to be easy, so Emacs is now the only editor that supports my own language at all :). Additionally, Emacs has the best UX of any program I've ever used. It is, by far, the most unified and consistent program I've seen--the same commands I use for getting around a code buffer are used to get around directory listings, documentation, compiler output, shell output and so on. Since everything, including the UI, is basically text,I don't have to treat the content much differently from the editor. This makes doing all sorts of sometimes complicated tasks easy. On top of this is has some incredibly awesome features. I am literally addicted to TRAMP--if I want to open a remote file, I just enter the remote path as if it was a normal file path and it just works. I can also open remote shell buffers just as easily. This makes working on several different servers at a time just as easy as working on local files exclusively; people watching me often don't even realize that some of the stuff I'm doing is remote. Org-mode is really great. For a simple, easy to learn outline editor it's extremely flexible. Using the same tool for notes, todos and even presentations is great. I also use Emacs to manage many shells, the way others use GNU Screen. This integrates managing a bunch of potentially remote shells into my workflow really well. It also has some really brilliant language-specific modes like AucTeX and JS-2. The normal Haskell (with some potential additions like Scion and ghc-mod, although I still haven't tried these) is also great. I even use it for Jabber and IRC. This makes it easier to code and chat at the same time and gives me access to a lot of Emacs's great features. A very practical example is the TeX input mode. If I want to use random unicode symbols, I can enable an input mode that automatically translates \lambda to λ and so on. This is also really useful for making some of my Haskell programs prettier :). So really, the old saw about Emacs being an operating system is basically true--it can even view images and PDFs! Really, the main thing I do outside of Emacs is browse the internet, and I could even do that in there. However, the rest of the saying (that it just needs a decent text editor) is less true; while the default bindings are perhaps less powerful than Vi's, they're still extremely good and make for a much better editor than any I've used, including those that attempt to emulate Emacs bindings, which inevitably miss a good portion of the movement and editing commands I use regularly. So yeah, Emacs is like magic. EDIT: Oh yeah, with Emacs server and a relatively nice laptop, opening a new Emacs window literally takes a fraction of a second. In fact the minimal fade-in animation I have takes longer than actually launching it.
aDemoUzer 15y ago
1 nano in ssh terminals 2 Eclipse for development 3 Notepad++ For quick changes to codes, write SQL queries and standard tool for storing temporary text.
user24 15y ago
pico/nano
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  This is the sort of thread that doesn't work when you can't see scores. Me too. In order of frequency I probably use nano > kate > NetBeans and the reverse in order of duration.
unsigner 15y ago
SciTE, but since it's not on the list, I voted Notepad++ (which is the same underlying editor with uglier, more bloated chrome on top). Second choice: Visual Studio 2010 with the minimap-in-scrollbar extension - still better than the one in Sublime Text 2 (which doesn't show the entire document, wtf?, and doesn't show edited lines). Also, the "find in files" implementation in VS2010 is better than Sublime Text's when you have hundreds, not a handful of hits.
- esente 15y ago
  Well, I will take a few hundreds MB Sublime text editor (with tons of plugins) over the few GB VS2010 IDE anyday.
  - vyrotek 15y ago
    Right. Because the size of the editor directly correlates with productivity.
- skeeterbug 15y ago
  Interesting. I have had VS 2010 lock up several times attempting to find in files. Searching the entire dojo source (7k some files) is very fast in Sublime Text 2. Though it is not a very fair comparison, my home PC has a solid state drive, while my work PC has a 7200RPM.
sunraa 15y ago
Switched recently from Textmate to Sublime for almost everything but iOS related work. So far so good.
bdfh42 15y ago
e [ http://www.e-texteditor.com/ http://www.e-texteditor.com/ ] is brilliant on Windows and supports TextMate bundles there. Simply the best I have ever found.
indubitably 15y ago
Wow, TextMate's glory days would appear to be over.
madvoid 15y ago
Nano and TextWrangler when I'm not using Arduino or Matlab. I usually go with whatever works best for that particular instance.
munday 15y ago
On my personal projects (osx, linux): nano as a quick and dirty editor, eclipse for java and scala, been messing with vim but not really proficient yet. At work (microsoft): visual studio, notepad++, notepad (on some servers that have nothing else installed.)
munday 15y ago
On my personal projects (osx, linux): nano as a quick and dirty editor, eclipse for java and scala, been messing with vim but not really proficient yet. At work (microsoft): visual studio, notepad++, notepad (on some servers that have nothing else installed.)
Irfaan 15y ago
A vote for UltraEdit here.
- Metapony 15y ago
  Me too.
chhantyal 15y ago
Gedit
ohhmaagawd 15y ago
I use IntelliJ for java/groovy/JavaScript. AppCode for Objective C. RubyMine for Ruby. Basically JetBrains products when I can. I have all the key bindings set consistently across all the IDEs. I think JetBrains makes the best editor on the planet if you really learn all the features avail. but JetBrains IDEs don't support quick editing of arbitrary files, so I use sublime for those. Again, I set up the sublime key bindings to be consistent with the JetBrains products. Sublime is very sweet. Not quite up to the JetBrains standards, but it's faster and you don't have to set up a project. And of course there is vim when I need it
- cageface 15y ago
  I'm a Jetbrains convert too. Editing on a structural level rather than a purely textual level is so much more efficient and having really strong refactoring tools has changed the way I code. I just wish it was easier to edit single files outside a project.
- kjetil 15y ago
  At least on OS X you can set up an "idea" command for opening arbitrary files. Only local files though. Check the File menu.
albertzeyer 15y ago
I use Qt Creator for C++ development (any, I don't really do Qt development). Really a great editor; really snappy and I think the best C++ support (as seen in auto completion and other stuff) I know in any IDE / editor. I have used Xcode before but the memory usage became so high in recent versions (>1.5GB or more) that it is mostly unusable for me now.
robwgibbons 15y ago
Geany
LinaLauneBaer 15y ago
I am using TextEdit...
mmphosis 15y ago
I use a "text editor" and I also use a "programming editor." The two are separate programs for different tasks. The "text editor" is for editing (English) text, spell checking, and on rare occasion adding some formatting. The programming editor is for writing code. Sometimes, I open small snippets of source code with the text editor. Text Editors: well, right now I am typing into a textbox in firefox Mac OS X: TextEdit Linux: Gedit or whatever comes with the distro Windows: WordPad Programming Editor: Xcode
schwit 15y ago
ultraedit
- Metapony 15y ago
  Best windows text editor by far.
parbo 15y ago
I use emacs because it's available everywhere, and can do everything I want. When I decided that I needed to learn something ubiquitous, i started with gvim. But it wasn't for me, so I went with emacs instead. It doesn't matter what you use, as long as you can do what you want. I think a conscious choice of editor is a fairly good indicator of a good programmer, regardless of the actual choice. But you'd be insane not to use emacs.
- Derbasti 15y ago
  > So long as it can do what you want. That is kind of the thing about Emacs and Vim, right? Vim is a text editor. Emacs is... well, Emacs is a text editor, too. And then an outliner, a news reader, a file manager, a source control interface, a psychiatrist, tetris, a mail client, an IM client and pretty much anything that can be represented in text and simple images. I used to use Vim for a year or two. Then Emacs, and I haven't looked back. Actually, that is not true. I have looked back quite a bit, since Vim is hands down a better text editor than Emacs. But I can't go back to IDEs really and Vim just sucks as a development environment if you can't combine it with a Unix command line. Emacs is the only great platform agnostic development environment I know, even though it might not be the best text editor out there. And yeah, there is Evil-mode. It is quite lovely, actually. But my brain just can't cope with dealing with Emacs and Vim simultaneously. So, I totally agree, you'd be insane not to use Emacs, really.
  - read_wharf 15y ago
    "Vim just sucks as a development environment if you can't combine it with a Unix command line." Where can you not combine Vim with a Unix[-like] command line? I use WinXP at work, and vim works quite nicely in a cygwin terminal.
    - Derbasti 15y ago
      Visual Studio based projects don't play nice with the command line. Linking MFC without VS is a fast path to madness.
swah 15y ago
If only Sublime Text 2 was as extensible as Emacs, the things we could do! (And they wouldn't have to be all text!)
FrankenTan 15y ago
I use gEdit for both text and programming for a couple of languages. The Cobalt theme is the best dark theme\colorlayout I've ever experienced, and I'm yet to find any others which I find as pleasant to the eyes while simultaneously allowing me (I am colorblind) to pick out the various things gedit highlight. If I'm not going with black-on-white I'll have to roll my own color layout based on Cobolt whenever I use anything else.
stuckk 15y ago
Wow. Sublime is used more than emacs and look at me here thinking i'm the only one.
tensor 15y ago
I use IntelliJ for writing Clojure. Vim for terminal editing, and Textmate for everything else.
Kenan 15y ago
I'm on Windows. I use Notepad++ virtually everyday. I only use Visual Studio for my C# projects, and other than that I do everything in Notepad++. Eclipse is for my only Java project.
bch 15y ago
Emacs and nvi -- so emacs and "other". If I cared a bit more, I'd say the common notion vim=="everything vi" pisses me off. Default installs of vim w/ their (to my sensibilities) hideous highlighting and bracket-jumping cursor are off-putting. I want my (n)vi to just stay out of the way.
extraevery 15y ago
Vico is awesome (it's like vim and textmate in one)
dbrmr 15y ago
Notepad2
aravindj 15y ago
In windows I use Notepad++. In linux I use gedit with Darkmate theme.
MattJ100 15y ago
I use nano, 99% of the time. I gave details last time a post like this came up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376321 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376321
sethish 15y ago
I'm surprised that more people don't mention bash tools, or gnu if that is the proper name for them. I edit more text files using a combination of ack-grep, cat, sed and pipes than my primary editor (Vim). I had a hard time understanding how one of my coworkers doesn't use a project-wide find (ack-grep, grep, find, &etc). One of my coworkers uses github's search for our repo. Bizarre, but works really well for him.
johncoltrane 15y ago
I just fell in love with Vim after years of TextMate (and BBEdit before and Dreamweaver 3 first). It's powerful, smartly designed, elegant in a weird way… and it works exactly the same on my Ubuntu box at home, on the VPNs I work with and on my Mac at work.
- dfc 15y ago
  Why wouldn't the same program work the same way on ubuntu, on your VPNs (I'm assuming you mean the machines you connect over a VPN to) and your mac?
  - johncoltrane 15y ago
    Sorry, I mistyped VPS. There are many reasons a program wouldn't work across systems. The primary would be that it is a Mac OS X or Windows-only app (TextMate) or that it needs a GUI, or that it makes too many assumptions about the platform it is running on. Vim works on many (if not all) systems, it can be run with or without a GUI without losing or breaking anything, etc. Obviously, Emacs has all the same pros but I liked Vim more. So Vim for me.
mgkimsal 15y ago
vim for small quick shell scripts, and for editing on remote servers (used to be a lot more, not as much these days). intellij for grails work. zend studio and/or vim for php work. visual studio family for .net work.
bugmenot 15y ago
Kwrite. Nano in the console. Why make something harder than it needs to be?
thefox 15y ago
Espresso. http://macrabbit.com/espresso/ http://macrabbit.com/espresso/
huhtenberg 15y ago
Funny enough - Notepad. Aside from having a single step undo, it is a very good editor.
handzhiev 15y ago
Kate. Strange it's not on the list. Anyone else using it?
- vasco 15y ago
  Yup, all the time. It has some nice plugins and the settings are simple enough. Terminal panel, several files open with splitted screen, it has everything!
- jk4930 15y ago
  Yes, for everything except editing word documents. :)
GoodIntentions 15y ago
Jed http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/ http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/ Notepad2 http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
ZanderEarth32 15y ago
I switch between CodeRunner and Chocolat. I like both, but don't love either. Will probably pony up for TextMate soon.
FrancescoRizzi 15y ago
TextPad
nirai 15y ago
As a guy who have been using VIM on linux for several years I say this: Check out Komodo Edit! It has made a huge leap since it started. It is an awesome editor for dynamic languages - particularly Python, JS, HTML, etc... It simply does so much right, so do your self a favor and give it a try.
aswanson 15y ago
Can anyone suggest a good (and free) Python development environment?
- no_more_death 15y ago
  I've done some coding in Eclipse with the PyDev plugin.
  - aswanson 15y ago
    Eclipse...man. It's non-intuitive to me. I don't know how to get that IDE working properly.
- reefab 15y ago
  I use Vim for that but can also recommend Komodo Edit: http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit
- amitparikh 15y ago
  It's not quite perfect yet, but Python Tools for Visual Studio (http://pytools.codeplex.com/ http://pytools.codeplex.com/) is actually pretty nice. If you're used to the VS IDE, it's not a bad environment for Python development.
samwhiteUK 15y ago
I use nano if it requires editing a file for an install etc, as I am already in terminal. If not, gedit is my goto - i don't use a text editor that much
richardk 15y ago
Eclipse has so many useful features for Java, and once you get used to it it's really not as bad as some people say it is. For any other language I just use gedit where I add line numbers, automatic indentation, current line highlighting, syntax highlighting and word completion.
aw3c2 15y ago
No mention of jEdit makes me sad. It is a cross-platform, highly versatile and FOSS editor with tons of great plugins (for example a minimap, XML syntax checking or auto-completion). http://www.jedit.org/ http://www.jedit.org/
- Avshalom 15y ago
  I use Vim these days but I've got a lot of fond memories of jEdit, it's a fantastic tool.
- was8309 15y ago
  jedit here (until someday emacs : "vim scripting" < java < (e)lisp ?)
petercooper 15y ago
Sloppily conflating this poll and the poll and discussion the other day about TDD, the average HN voter can't grok TDD yet is down with vim :-)
jrbaldwin 15y ago
Nano, because openWRT >_<
bialecki 15y ago
Wow, looks like 50% use vim/emacs daily. As a regular Textmate user, I don't have any issues with my workflow, but I have to ask. I use vim/emacs when I do devops, but I don't think I'd want it to be my regular editor. Might be a matter of preference, but just to ask... What're the things I'm missing by not using vim/emacs when I use Textmate? I'd be most helpful if someone could frame an answer in the form of "with Textmate you do..., and then with vim/emacs it's just..."
- phamilton 15y ago
  V20jd20kp
- Derbasti 15y ago
  I guess Emacs and Vim get so many mentiones partly because we all want to rationalize the effort we put in to learn and maintain them. Text editors that cost less effort have probably a less profound impact on our lives and thus deserve less discussion. With Textmate you write in Markdown. In Emacs you have org-mode, which is mind-boggingly more powerful. Textmate lacked a code browser last time I checked (not entirely sure there). It does not have Magit or AucTex, either. Last, and certainly not least, simple text navigation and manipulation in Textmate is way inferior to Emacs or particularly Vim. As in: no macros, no incremental regex search and replace, and just a lot less movement and editing commands. Also, a lot less configurable. Well, and Textmate is Mac only of course.
  - nocipher 15y ago
    I think the impact of a text editor depends on your daily workflow. I do a lot of system administration and use emacs nearly daily to edit configuration files and write shell scripts. Since almost everything I do involves terminal sessions, a GUI-driven editor is simply unfeasible. I simply could not do my job as efficiently without being a knowledgeable emacs (or vi) user.
fmardini 15y ago
Emacs 24 with evil mode, the best of all worlds
fchollet 15y ago
Aptana (Eclipse-based) for development. OmmWriter for creative writing. TextEdit for quick notes.
ktizo 15y ago
jedit
ricardobeat 15y ago
Used TextMate for a good 2 years, Notepad++ for many years before that. Then I switched to Sublime Text 2 in January and haven't looked back. It's fast, feature rich, supports almost any language via tmbundles, and fixes many quirks that TM had. It just needs a better bundle/plugin manager to be perfect. I code in javascript/coffeescript 90% of the time, but regardless of editor, Zen HTML/CSS is of utmost importance - can't live without it.
emidln 15y ago
vim, because I spent the time years ago learning it and haven't had cause to look back. vim-python is a lifesaver to avoid writing vimscript.
pbsurf 15y ago
SciTE
zengr 15y ago
A poll I conducted on HN last year: http://utkarshsengar.com/2011/03/analysis-your-favourite-text-editoride/ http://utkarshsengar.com/2011/03/analysis-your-favourite-tex...
wazoox 15y ago
I use vim often, but my editor of choice is nedit. I currently host nedit.org, BTW.
jfb 15y ago
Every day for twenty years. Emacs. At one point I was so desperate to run Emacs on a Macintosh that I bought and installed MachTen. If you don't remember MachTen, consider yourself lucky.
- ScottBurson 15y ago
  Heh, I remember MachTen. Yes, I used it for the same reason. And I've been using Emacs in various of its incarnations since about 1978. (The original ITS Emacs, followed by Zmacs, MINCE, and then Lucid Emacs/XEmacs, the latter still being my preferred variant.)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
LordHog 15y ago
For Windows I used UltraEdit and for Mac I use BBEdit
- Metapony 15y ago
  This is what I use/would use if I had a Mac. It's all about having a great ability to search directories and filesets.
s00pcan 15y ago
I've used Vim for a year now, daily at work for about 7 months, and still consider myself only a basic to intermediate user of it.
martindale 15y ago
gedit
jvandenbroeck 15y ago
Vim or eclipse with vim bindings, I'm addicted to them. When I'm typing a document in Word I sometimes want to move up a line by pressing 'k'..
joe24pack 15y ago
vim whenever I'm ssh'ed into some remote server, an ide when developing code in a project for work, emacs when playing with lisp, textwrangler when playing on my mac.
MitziMoto 15y ago
I use VIM almost exclusively at work because I do most of my development on a virtual SUSE machine. I do enjoy using Sublime 2 with vintage mode for stuff when I can. I love the accessibility of ctrl+p <filename> to open files quickly. The development environment I still dream of is to somehow merge the linux terminal with something like Sublime 2. If I could have a separate Sublime tab open that I could use as a terminal, I would easily pay for that. Can one of you guys who is a lot smarter than me go ahead and build that? Thanks.
- wuub 15y ago
  I'm trying to do exactly that (embed a terminal, not make you pay for it) with https://github.com/wuub/SublimePTY https://github.com/wuub/SublimePTY, but the progress has slowed down to a stop lately because of humongous pileup at work. You can also try SublimeREPL [https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL] / Shell for now, but it's good only for very basic stuff as SublimeREPL does not aim to be a terminal emulator at all.
RexRollman 15y ago
When using Windows, I like using Notepad2. In Unix-like OSes, I generally go with Nvi, or Vim if that is not available.
read_wharf 15y ago
I use Vim because I've always used vi/Vim.
johndbritton 15y ago
nano
mikehoward 15y ago
I use TexMate for Rails; emacs for Lisp & other stuff; and vi for quick git edits and things like that (also remote edits)
bsoist 15y ago
I use vim and Textmate every day. I like vim for it's speed, but I do use Textmate a lot for it's project mode and for a lot of markdown and xhtml - just out of habit really.
tylerlh 15y ago
Nice to see all the love for Sublime Text 2 here. Definitely got my vote.
davvid 15y ago
I was helping my friend edit his website yesterday. He's an illustrator/character designer and needed a text editor on Tiger (old laptop) for editing html/css/etc. We tried very hard to find an editor that wasn't vim. I looked around.. textmate sounded nice but it was only free for 30 days. Lots of other apps simply didn't run on Tiger. So we ended up downloading macvim. He picked it up and was able to be productive the same night with very little coaching. Coincidentally, he has wrist pain from mouse abuse so having a keyboard-centric interface is incredibly helpful. I'm a vim expert and my gut feeling to avoid vim ended up being completely wrong: he had no problem understanding it and was almost immediately productive. Thank you macvim developers for not forgetting about the little guys with old OSes!
- Vitaly 15y ago
  Your editor is such a central part of the workflow that I really can't see how you can choose something else if the one you like better costs just 50$. You will be using it for countless hours, so if you really liked TextMate more then vim I'd say go and buy it. That being said, I use Vim, and I do have licensed TextMate. In fact we have bought 6 licenses for TextMate but not using them as we all switched back to vim.
  - jannes 15y ago
    I think you might have overlooked this bit: He's an illustrator/character designer and needed a text editor on Tiger (old laptop) for editing html/css/etc. It doesn't sound like it's a "central part" of his workflow, so that's why he didn't want to buy an editor.
    - Vitaly 15y ago
      well, a designer that needs to edit html/css sound like a part of a full-design-stack solution to me. which means he does edit it for a non trivial amount of time, so something like TextMate or Coda might fit the bill pretty well. If you are doing anything in a professional capacity (i.e. getting payed for it) then even a very slight improvement in productivity will pay for it self almost immediately when we are talking about a 50$ price tag.
shenberg 15y ago
I'm surprised no-one mentioned Source Insight - it's by far the best editor I've used for truly large C/C++ code-bases - doing symbol lookups almost instantly on a source tree eating up several GBs on the drive was extremely impressive when I was introduced to the software in 2004 (admittedly, the rest of the world has caught up on this one), but what made it great is the pervasiveness of using that capability - there is a separate window which shows the context of the symbol your cursor is currently on, instantly updating when the cursor moves, giving you for every symbol its context at a glance. That alone is so useful I miss it still (MSVC has had the almost equivalent 'code definition' pane for a while, but it's so slow to update it's still effectively useless). Also, to this day it seems like the only code editor that I've seen which doesn't use monospaced fonts, and better yet, utilizes that properly (for example, parentheses vary slightly in size according to nesting level, so it's easy to see at a glance which parentheses match).
Metapony 15y ago
I use Windows, so I am using IDM's UEStudio, which isn't on the list. (There's a less feature rich version called UltraEdit, too.) It's the only windows text editor I've found that has features akin to BBEdit (which I haven't used since the old dot-com days back in 2000.)
dblock 15y ago
Redcar
drinchev 15y ago
Sublime Text 2 works perfectly for me. It has TextMate compatibility for syntax bundles, so now my LESS files display pretty in the editor. I've been using TextMate not long ago, but there is no port on Windows. ST 2 has windows and OSX version.
Vitaly 15y ago
Using vim for the last 10 years or so. Had switched to TextMate for about a year in 2005 when started doing Rails, but went back to vim quickly afterwards. Tried to switch to sublime2 lately, but its far far from being ready. may be one day. Vim is old. Way too old I'd say. And has absolutely hideous extension language, horrible internal API and looks like crap. Sadly nothing still comes close to replace it for me.
- intelekshual 15y ago
  What makes you say Sublime Text 2 is far from being ready? It's relatively stable for a beta product, has an impressive list of features and is highly extensible; not to mention it's being actively developed, unlike some other editors. Just curious how you reached the conclusion that is isn't "ready".
ZeWaren 15y ago
I use butterflies. http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/ And also, vim.
christiangenco 15y ago
Started in TextWrangler/BBEdit, saw the light and moved to TextMate, ended up switching the default application for about twenty filetypes to open in TextMate, and lived merrily for about four years. I've always been scared of Vim, so a few months ago I decided to learn it but never used it full-time (quite handy for remote editing, though). I'm currently in the transition to Sublime Text 2 after it being recommended to me at a hackathon, but there are still a handful of things (markdown editing, better find/replace dialog) in TextMate that keep it in my dock. I still use TextMate for writing papers or letters out of habit (though subl's distraction-free editing is quite tempting).
trurl123 15y ago
I am using FAR Manager every day to edit text files.
fisadev 15y ago
vim, with lots of interesting plugins :) (my config: http://code.google.com/p/fisa-vim-config/ http://code.google.com/p/fisa-vim-config/ )
jarrodtaylor 14y ago
I've been a fan of Chocolat lately. Simple, straightforward and easy on the eyes. http://chocolatapp.com/ http://chocolatapp.com/
amk 14y ago
I keep hearing good things about Sublime, but I had no idea it was this popular. Maybe it's time to switch from Notepad++
jilebedev 14y ago
Each day, you arrive to work, sit in a chair, and focus on Python programming. After five years, you're a pretty damned experienced Python developer: you've become wiser, more efficient, and generally more productive. But ... you're still no better at chair sitting. You've done just as much chair sitting as you have programming, but you've barely progressed in chair sitting. But that's different, you say - programming languages are open and complex, with many libraries to explore, blog posts and stack exchange threads to read, and many fun side projects to fiddle with myself. Heh, that's the key. A programming language doesn't limit your growth, your self-betterment. A chair does limit your growth: it's a simple tool, and there's not much improving in chair sitting after you've fiddled with the levers for five minutes. I use vim because it's a programing language, not a chair. I consistently learn better ways of editing text in vim. I'm not advocating vim here, so much as I am advocating to thoughtfully examine an activity you do often (text editing) and then looking at the tool you're using (text editor) and asking: am I constantly learning better ways to accomplish my goals?
joeyespo 14y ago
Crimson Editor. It has a very fast startup time, even on older machines. Also, its syntax highlighting is simple enough to add new languages. Including your own toy language. This helps tremendously when you're still exploring potential syntax.
milliams 14y ago
Kate

151 points by methoddk 15y ago

Do you use an IDE, vim, emacs, gasp maybe even Notepad? I'm partial to vim, but wondering what everyone else uses on a daily basis, maybe even comment why? Ease of use? Syntax completion? etc...

waleedka 15y ago

Komodo Edit.

justauser 15y ago
Another user here. Please add Komodo IDE/Edit.
methoddk 15y ago
added, thanks.
nirai 15y ago
+1

spdy 15y ago

Why did you not split up the IDE part ? To Sublime Text 2 / Textmate / Eclipse / Visual Studio etc.

methoddk 15y ago
I've added those now, thanks for the tip.

methoddk 15y ago

Seems like a few people like Sublime Text 2 Any particular reasons why? I currently use MacVim with solarize dark color palette.

stravid 15y ago
It's fast and works. Since discovering it two years ago I still haven't found a reason to switch.
- mds101 15y ago
  In addition it is very actively developed and updates flow in often. Also has quite a large number of useful plugins.
bluishgreen 15y ago
Before Sublime I was using emacs. Sublime Text 2 is really well done. You have to try it to understand. If you want a characterization, I would call it the balsamiq of text editors.
MaxGabriel 15y ago
Most of my decisions are pretty forced. I don't use Eclipse or Gedit because they were crashing my computer. I don't want to spend time learning vim, and am skeptical of it because I read bad things about modes in UI books. For me sublime text 2 just got the basics right: black background, tabs, text completion, no crashes. The only feature I really appreciate that seems unusual are the pinstripes denoting tab characters
- roryokane 15y ago
  I don't have a problem with Vim's main modes, because I always know what mode I am in. Not only is the name of the current mode always in the bottom-left of the window, the cursor also looks different depending on whether I am Insert mode (vertical line) or Normal mode (rectangle). I suspect that your UI books warned against modes where the user might forget what mode they are in. However, you also go into another mode when you enter the beginning of a multi-key shortcut (such as 'ma' to mark the current location with label 'a'). This is indicated at the bottom-right of the window by showing the keys you have typed so far (such as 'm'). Since that is the only indicator, sometimes I have accidentally forgotten I was in this mode. So that can be a problem. But it's easy to undo mistakes - just press 'u' in Normal mode, or Ctrl-O if the effect was moving the cursor. And if I know I'm in some weird mode and just want to get out, I can just mash Esc, and that always brings me safely back to Normal mode. Of course, the reason Vim has modes in the first place is to give modifier-key-less ways to access a lot of functionality. I think the modes are overall a good thing. It's very nice to be able to edit and rearrange text with so few keystrokes and no need to move your hand to the mouse. But configuring Vim so it works well can be a large pain. I've been using public computers to program a lot recently, so I've been using Sublime Text 2 on those, because of its good defaults and cross-platform nature. I hope to soon upload my Vim configuration files online so I can use it on other computers, but first I have a bunch of bugs in my configuration I have to fix. That's where I envy Emacs for having a good configuration language.
- read_wharf 15y ago
  "I read bad things about modes in UI books." This makes me skeptical of UI books.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
It took me five years (and counting) to get Vim to a place where I'm happy with how it looks and functions. ST2 gives me that out-of-the-box, and it's improving constantly.
- wonderzombie 15y ago
  I switched from Vim to ST2 two days ago, and this was precisely why. At the risk of repeating what you wrote above: strictly speaking, Sublime Text 2 doesn't do anything you couldn't do with Vim, either by installing multiple plugins or writing your own plugin. The difference is that most of the plugins I installed in Vim are features which just work in ST2. I can't _believe_ I went this long without a robust "find in files" or a project system. Also, in the ~10 or so years I've used Vim, I've _never_ learned its specialized scripting language. Every time I've tried, I've given up in frustration. You can use another language but you can never truly escape vimscript. ST2 plugins are written in Python.
frou_dh 15y ago
It's tastefully designed in every sense, from the look to the feature set to the extensibility. The one thing I'm not keen on is its reuse of actual TextMate bundles. I definitely understand why it was done, but some of the bundles seem a bit legacy and they all use gnarly XML.
Rayne 15y ago
The only reason I don't use ST2 is because it isn't nearly as good as Vim at indenting and highlighting the languages I use. Another reason would be that I can't use it in a terminal and would have to switch to another editor. But the rest of ST2 is utterly fantastic. In particular, using Python as the extension language. Elisp is okay, but VimL is terrible. ST2 is the only popular editor I'm aware of that has a real programming language as its extension language and not a editor-specific language.
Geee 15y ago
For me the most important feature is the quick file finder / browser / preview whatever that is called (cmd/ctrl+P), along with the ability to save folders as projects. Everything else is really nice too, but that is definitely the feature that sold it for me.
ohhmaagawd 15y ago
Sublime is great in general. One area it lacks is good auto-formatting support (it has the feature, but it generally fails) I use this feature all the time in JetBrains IDEs and it's tough to live w/out once you are used to it.
losvedir 15y ago
I was a MacVim user before switching to ST2. It looks nice (shouldn't matter, I guess, but it does to me a bit). For example, scrolling is much smoother and easier for my eyes to track and keep my place -- MacVim only lets you scroll complete line by complete line which is kind of jumpy. The folder hierarchy in the sidebar is better integrated. Open a new ST2 window, go Project -> Add Folder to Project, and then all its subfolders and files will be easily browseable. It's not always necessary, though, because the fuzzy file finder search is so good. (Like Command T, but built-in). Multiple cursors. I use this more than I would have thought. You can command-click and get multiple cursors, or you can highlight a word and command-d to incrementally highlight each further instance. Then, you can type and it goes to all the cursors simultaneously. If you, say, shift-opt-left arrow, it will highlight the word to the left, and then you can copy, and it will copy every word but associated to its particular cursor, so you can then hit command-right arrow to go to the end of the line, and then paste each of the copied words. So, say, I want three similar json objects, one related to cats, one dogs, and one birds. (This is a contrived example, and probably not the best way to do it, but just to demonstrate the power here.) Now what I'd do is I'd write on three separate lines, "cat", "dog", and "bird". Then, I'd highlight each of them to get multiple cursors, hit cmd-c so I have "cat", "dog", and "bird" copied for each cursor, and then just write the json object and all three would be done at the same time. If I wanted a variable to be called "myAnimal", then I could paste (so, I'd get the three animals). Opt-shift-left arrow to highlight them, command-p (which brings up the fuzzy-finder for all of sublime's functionality), type "capt", which will bring up "Capitalize", hit enter to do so. (Now I have "Cat", "Dog", and "Bird"). Then opt-left arrow to go to the beginning of the word, and type "my", and now I have "myCat", "myDog", and "myBird". I'm not sure how well that came across, but basically multiple cursors is a killer feature that I didn't have in Vim. Couple that with a powerful macro system of recording keystrokes, and then using those macros with the multiple cursors, you can do a lot of editing fast.

adjwilli 15y ago

TextWrangler (BBEdit when my company paid for it)

erd 15y ago

You might want to toss RubyMine and IntelliJ on the list.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago

Vim for whenever I'm running something headless or I'm ssh'ed into a server somewhere. Eclipse for any project that's an excessive amount of Java, which at this point is only Android apps. XCode for any project that's an excessive amount of Objective-C, so just iOS or OS X apps. Visual Studio / MonoDevelop for anything that's going to be published to a Microsoft environment (Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, or Unity cross-platform development). Sublime Text 2 with Vintage mode for everything else. I'd love to just use one editor for everything, but the language IDEs (Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio) are too good in terms of intellisense and platform integration to pass up for their respective languages. It's a pain in the ass juggling contexts, especially with vastly different keybinds in various editors, but it's definitely worth the pain when you're on a roll with something.

methoddk 15y ago
I'm the same way, I really love vim for python, ruby, html. But I've been eyeing up Sublime Text 2... It looks nice
- kisom 15y ago
  What sold me on ST2 was the Package Control (http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control) and the fact it works on my Linux box and Macbook. Generally ST2, with Aquamacs + SLIME for Clojure and Common Lisp and vim on console because my fingers are hard-wired to it (I've been using it for almost a decade).
  - aiscott 15y ago
    I was pretty excited about sublime text 2, and I use it on my Mac and windows box. But I can't use it on our work cluster due to it not supporting our version of rhel (5 I think)
skrebbel 15y ago
> I'd love to just use one editor for everything, but the language IDEs (Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio) are too good in terms of intellisense and platform integration to pass up for their respective languages. It's a pain in the ass juggling contexts, especially with vastly different keybinds in various editors, but it's definitely worth the pain when you're on a roll with something. That. The religious text-editor wars really hurt the discussion when language-IDE-platform combinations exist that really boost productivity and maintainability. In the same way, though, it makes little sense coding Python in Visual Studio. Makes me wonder if all the "My editor simply is best" people can code in more than a language and a half.

x5315 15y ago

Why isn't TextMate on the list?

methoddk 15y ago
added

ZenDan 15y ago

Vim because it's lightweight, fast, and the vast plugins that are available makes it almost like an IDE

rsandhu 15y ago

textmate should be on this list

eshvk 15y ago

Vim for almost all coding (except for Java: I still use vim for rolling out tiny programs but since eclim, the Vim plugin for eclipse is not very good, I am forced to use eclipse). I use emacs in vim-mode as a GTD planner, mainly because org-mode is an incredibly useful planning tool that I am able to use on any machine that is linked to my dropbox account as long as I know the markup.

writetoalok 15y ago
I have wondered more than a few times, what it would take to port org-mode to Vim ... I note that someone gave up on the slime port of vim for various reasons ...
- aerique 15y ago
  AFAIK Slimv is being actively developed and quite usable (although I haven't used it myself): http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531 Also wrt org-mode: if one called out to Emacs from Vim for exporting to different formats it shouldn't be too much work.
eshvk 15y ago
Forgot to add: One another situation where I would use emacs is if ever I really got into R. ess (emacs speaks statistics) is quite good compared to vim equivalents.

rachelbythebay 15y ago

nano or pico, depending on what's installed

kooshball 15y ago

where's notepad/wordpad? I use it all the time on windows servers that dont have notepad++ installed.

eccp 15y ago

I mostly use Emacs for development. Vim for small edits on the console, sometimes I open gEdit to read plain text files when I'm not coding. On Windows (under Virtualbox or on remote servers) I tend to use Noteapad++. I don't use much Eclipse these days except for a few touches to an Android project.

pandemicsyn 15y ago

vim most of the time but end up switching to Chocolatapp if its html/js for Flask.

barumrho 15y ago

I use XCode for iOS development and Vim for everything else. Tried to use Vim for iOS development as well, but XCode has incomparable integration of code completion, compiler, etc. (Even though it is slow and buggy.) I am open to using other editors/IDE if they came with better code completion and integration for Web related technologies, but I have not found one that outweighs the benefit of using Vim.

namzo 15y ago

On windows, it used to be Notepad++ but since I moved to mac, I've been using textmate. I wish there was Notepad++ for mac.

methoddk 15y ago
Check out TextWrangler. Pretty similar
ricardobeat 15y ago
ST2 gets you most of the missing features, like bracket matching, sane indenting etc.

evincarofautumn 15y ago

Emacs: familiar, useful, widely preinstalled, and uniform across Linux, Windows, and Unix. Notepad++: minimal without being irritatingly underpowered like its ++-less namesake, plus Scintilla is nice.

saryant 15y ago

MacVim with the Janus additions. https://github.com/carlhuda/janus https://github.com/carlhuda/janus I always catch myself trying to use Vim bindings in non-Vim environments. I would pay serious money for software that would allow me to work like that in every Max OS textbox.

aiscott 15y ago
I agree. Emacs type key bindings are prevalent in osx, sad to see vim missing. Although I was so happy to learn c-d was delete in cocoa boxes, especially since that is easier to type than fn-delete. I mostly use emacs these days, but still use vim too. To keep my brain from scrambling, I changed emacs movement keys to match vim (ie c-h, c-j, c-k, c-m).
jergason 15y ago
FYI, you can set bash to vi mode with `set keymap vi && set -o vi`.
snth 15y ago
Well, there's this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/ if you're using Firefox.
erikcw 15y ago
I use Quickcursor -- you just setup a global hotkey and it will open the contents of any text widget in the editor of your choice. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor

pknerd 15y ago

No Netbeans???? ++1 for Netbeans!

terhechte 15y ago

I'm currently using Xcode for everything iOS / OSX (most of my work actually) and am going back and forth between Vim and Sublime for everything else. I've been using Vim for years and Sublime really shines in some regards. However, it lacks some plugins that I really like about Vim (like EasyMotion https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion) which is why I'm deciding on a project basis which editor to use. (Also, I really like to be able to browse for files without having to reach for the mouse). Btw. In that regard, I find it fantastic that the Vim bindings start to become some sort of unofficial text editor control standard; more and more editors are adding Vim bindings (like http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ it has a Vim Plugin too).

Deinumite 15y ago
I think vintage mode in sublime text 2 offers vim like keybindings as well. As for browsing for files using the keyboard, I'm a huge fan of Command-T. https://github.com/wincent/Command-T https://github.com/wincent/Command-T

methoddk 15y ago

At the moment, vim is a runaway victor as far as popularity. As I expected it to be. Insanely simple and so many great plugins.

WiseWeasel 15y ago

Dreamweaver as a fancy text editor. /ducks

nocipher 15y ago
When I first started doing web programming at my first real programming job, everyone there used Dreamweaver as the IDE of choice. I used it for a few months before I could no longer deal with its idiosyncrasies. Now, I absolutely hate the program. It got to the point that I would only use Dreamweaver for remote file management (silly, I know, but I was still learning) and would open the files in emacs for actual editing. Eventually, I stopped using it all together and forced myself to find other ways to retrieve remote files. In retrospect, I should have set up a source control repository and left the programming team a little better than I found it. Hindsight is 20-20.

mesdeparts 15y ago

Where is gedit?

whateverer 15y ago

Gedit is the one I use most. Really, why would I need more for daily use? I wouldn't bother pasting stuff or taking simple notes with Vim, Emacs or even the specialized apps for that. I can read text files from the file browser with that, and for my other viewing need I have less. When I program, it's usually Emacs, otherwise Eclipse for Java.

freehunter 15y ago
I use Notepad for this same reason. It's so easy to just hit win -> r - > 'notepad' on my XP laptop at work. Anything I need a text editor for, Notepad fits the bill. When it comes time to start coding, then I move to an IDE. No need to get fancy.
- bsoist 15y ago
  I just hit win -> r -> 'vim' when I'm using Windows.

DotSauce 15y ago

Noted since '01: http://software.iamcal.com/noted/ http://software.iamcal.com/noted/

kaerast 15y ago

Vim when I want to quickly edit a file Geany for writing longer scripts RubyMine for Ruby development (mostly Chef cookbooks these days)

hsmyers 15y ago

emacs in Unix. EditPlus in Windows. If I'm in a hurry in Unix, I'll use gedit depending on the distro...

gautaml 15y ago
+1 for EditPlus!
sebastianavina 15y ago
When I was at middle school, when I was just a beginner, I had the problem of not having a nice and more advanced notepad. I spent a while until I found editplus, after that I, experimented with a lot of text editors unsuccsesfully. Once in a while, while googling "great text editor" saw something about those strange linux text editors. Crazy people, I thought. Under editplus I learned about regular expressions and a bunch of things. Funny enough the first thing I made when installed linux for the first time was to install ediplus under Wine. Just some time later when I learned about emacs I really understood the programmers world. Still editplus is the best editor for windows I have ever found. I have some "util" apps I use since who knows when under Windows: SqlYog, Editplus, LeechFTP, Putty, StartupCPL (http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml), hdclone. It's funny to see how much easy is the world for a developer under linux. Util apps simply doesn't exist. Just some commands that may not come by default on your distro.

DodgyEggplant 15y ago

Wing IDE

gburt 15y ago

vim on the command line, TextWrangler in the UI. I find its nice to have TextWrangler open with my todo.txt and bills.txt files, and is also nice to be able to quickly throw in little hacks / debug code / etc., but for "real editing" vim all the way.

xymostech 15y ago
Have you tried using MacVim before? It provides a fairly nice UI for editing files but with the full vim interface/keybindings, and uses all your .vimrc files as well.

luriel 15y ago

ed, acme ( http://acme.cat-v.org http://acme.cat-v.org ), vi. For quick one-off edits, still nothing can beat ed. Acme is great for working with many files. And vi is the last resort for environments where acme is not practical. Of course, this days real men use sam, but I'm too spoiled to give up Acme and mouse chording.

4ad 15y ago
I remember there's a chording patch for sam.
- luriel 15y ago
  I know there have been several chording patches for sam, but I don't think any of them work reliably.

tikhonj 15y ago

I use Emacs because it does everything, most of it well, and is absurdly easy to extend. I've found myself missing features several times; each time, it took maybe three or four lines of code and maybe ten minutes to add. Even adding basic support for a new language turned out to be easy, so Emacs is now the only editor that supports my own language at all :). Additionally, Emacs has the best UX of any program I've ever used. It is, by far, the most unified and consistent program I've seen--the same commands I use for getting around a code buffer are used to get around directory listings, documentation, compiler output, shell output and so on. Since everything, including the UI, is basically text,I don't have to treat the content much differently from the editor. This makes doing all sorts of sometimes complicated tasks easy. On top of this is has some incredibly awesome features. I am literally addicted to TRAMP--if I want to open a remote file, I just enter the remote path as if it was a normal file path and it just works. I can also open remote shell buffers just as easily. This makes working on several different servers at a time just as easy as working on local files exclusively; people watching me often don't even realize that some of the stuff I'm doing is remote. Org-mode is really great. For a simple, easy to learn outline editor it's extremely flexible. Using the same tool for notes, todos and even presentations is great. I also use Emacs to manage many shells, the way others use GNU Screen. This integrates managing a bunch of potentially remote shells into my workflow really well. It also has some really brilliant language-specific modes like AucTeX and JS-2. The normal Haskell (with some potential additions like Scion and ghc-mod, although I still haven't tried these) is also great. I even use it for Jabber and IRC. This makes it easier to code and chat at the same time and gives me access to a lot of Emacs's great features. A very practical example is the TeX input mode. If I want to use random unicode symbols, I can enable an input mode that automatically translates \lambda to λ and so on. This is also really useful for making some of my Haskell programs prettier :). So really, the old saw about Emacs being an operating system is basically true--it can even view images and PDFs! Really, the main thing I do outside of Emacs is browse the internet, and I could even do that in there. However, the rest of the saying (that it just needs a decent text editor) is less true; while the default bindings are perhaps less powerful than Vi's, they're still extremely good and make for a much better editor than any I've used, including those that attempt to emulate Emacs bindings, which inevitably miss a good portion of the movement and editing commands I use regularly. So yeah, Emacs is like magic. EDIT: Oh yeah, with Emacs server and a relatively nice laptop, opening a new Emacs window literally takes a fraction of a second. In fact the minimal fade-in animation I have takes longer than actually launching it.

aDemoUzer 15y ago

1 nano in ssh terminals 2 Eclipse for development 3 Notepad++ For quick changes to codes, write SQL queries and standard tool for storing temporary text.

user24 15y ago

pico/nano

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
This is the sort of thread that doesn't work when you can't see scores. Me too. In order of frequency I probably use nano > kate > NetBeans and the reverse in order of duration.

unsigner 15y ago

SciTE, but since it's not on the list, I voted Notepad++ (which is the same underlying editor with uglier, more bloated chrome on top). Second choice: Visual Studio 2010 with the minimap-in-scrollbar extension - still better than the one in Sublime Text 2 (which doesn't show the entire document, wtf?, and doesn't show edited lines). Also, the "find in files" implementation in VS2010 is better than Sublime Text's when you have hundreds, not a handful of hits.

esente 15y ago
Well, I will take a few hundreds MB Sublime text editor (with tons of plugins) over the few GB VS2010 IDE anyday.
- vyrotek 15y ago
  Right. Because the size of the editor directly correlates with productivity.
skeeterbug 15y ago
Interesting. I have had VS 2010 lock up several times attempting to find in files. Searching the entire dojo source (7k some files) is very fast in Sublime Text 2. Though it is not a very fair comparison, my home PC has a solid state drive, while my work PC has a 7200RPM.

sunraa 15y ago

Switched recently from Textmate to Sublime for almost everything but iOS related work. So far so good.

bdfh42 15y ago

e [ http://www.e-texteditor.com/ http://www.e-texteditor.com/ ] is brilliant on Windows and supports TextMate bundles there. Simply the best I have ever found.

indubitably 15y ago

Wow, TextMate's glory days would appear to be over.

madvoid 15y ago

Nano and TextWrangler when I'm not using Arduino or Matlab. I usually go with whatever works best for that particular instance.

munday 15y ago

On my personal projects (osx, linux): nano as a quick and dirty editor, eclipse for java and scala, been messing with vim but not really proficient yet. At work (microsoft): visual studio, notepad++, notepad (on some servers that have nothing else installed.)

munday 15y ago

Irfaan 15y ago

A vote for UltraEdit here.

Metapony 15y ago
Me too.

chhantyal 15y ago

Gedit

ohhmaagawd 15y ago

I use IntelliJ for java/groovy/JavaScript. AppCode for Objective C. RubyMine for Ruby. Basically JetBrains products when I can. I have all the key bindings set consistently across all the IDEs. I think JetBrains makes the best editor on the planet if you really learn all the features avail. but JetBrains IDEs don't support quick editing of arbitrary files, so I use sublime for those. Again, I set up the sublime key bindings to be consistent with the JetBrains products. Sublime is very sweet. Not quite up to the JetBrains standards, but it's faster and you don't have to set up a project. And of course there is vim when I need it

cageface 15y ago
I'm a Jetbrains convert too. Editing on a structural level rather than a purely textual level is so much more efficient and having really strong refactoring tools has changed the way I code. I just wish it was easier to edit single files outside a project.
kjetil 15y ago
At least on OS X you can set up an "idea" command for opening arbitrary files. Only local files though. Check the File menu.

albertzeyer 15y ago

I use Qt Creator for C++ development (any, I don't really do Qt development). Really a great editor; really snappy and I think the best C++ support (as seen in auto completion and other stuff) I know in any IDE / editor. I have used Xcode before but the memory usage became so high in recent versions (>1.5GB or more) that it is mostly unusable for me now.

robwgibbons 15y ago

Geany

LinaLauneBaer 15y ago

I am using TextEdit...

mmphosis 15y ago

I use a "text editor" and I also use a "programming editor." The two are separate programs for different tasks. The "text editor" is for editing (English) text, spell checking, and on rare occasion adding some formatting. The programming editor is for writing code. Sometimes, I open small snippets of source code with the text editor. Text Editors: well, right now I am typing into a textbox in firefox Mac OS X: TextEdit Linux: Gedit or whatever comes with the distro Windows: WordPad Programming Editor: Xcode

schwit 15y ago

ultraedit

Metapony 15y ago
Best windows text editor by far.

parbo 15y ago

I use emacs because it's available everywhere, and can do everything I want. When I decided that I needed to learn something ubiquitous, i started with gvim. But it wasn't for me, so I went with emacs instead. It doesn't matter what you use, as long as you can do what you want. I think a conscious choice of editor is a fairly good indicator of a good programmer, regardless of the actual choice. But you'd be insane not to use emacs.

Derbasti 15y ago
> So long as it can do what you want. That is kind of the thing about Emacs and Vim, right? Vim is a text editor. Emacs is... well, Emacs is a text editor, too. And then an outliner, a news reader, a file manager, a source control interface, a psychiatrist, tetris, a mail client, an IM client and pretty much anything that can be represented in text and simple images. I used to use Vim for a year or two. Then Emacs, and I haven't looked back. Actually, that is not true. I have looked back quite a bit, since Vim is hands down a better text editor than Emacs. But I can't go back to IDEs really and Vim just sucks as a development environment if you can't combine it with a Unix command line. Emacs is the only great platform agnostic development environment I know, even though it might not be the best text editor out there. And yeah, there is Evil-mode. It is quite lovely, actually. But my brain just can't cope with dealing with Emacs and Vim simultaneously. So, I totally agree, you'd be insane not to use Emacs, really.
- read_wharf 15y ago
  "Vim just sucks as a development environment if you can't combine it with a Unix command line." Where can you not combine Vim with a Unix[-like] command line? I use WinXP at work, and vim works quite nicely in a cygwin terminal.
  - Derbasti 15y ago
    Visual Studio based projects don't play nice with the command line. Linking MFC without VS is a fast path to madness.

swah 15y ago

If only Sublime Text 2 was as extensible as Emacs, the things we could do! (And they wouldn't have to be all text!)

FrankenTan 15y ago

I use gEdit for both text and programming for a couple of languages. The Cobalt theme is the best dark theme\colorlayout I've ever experienced, and I'm yet to find any others which I find as pleasant to the eyes while simultaneously allowing me (I am colorblind) to pick out the various things gedit highlight. If I'm not going with black-on-white I'll have to roll my own color layout based on Cobolt whenever I use anything else.

stuckk 15y ago

Wow. Sublime is used more than emacs and look at me here thinking i'm the only one.

tensor 15y ago

I use IntelliJ for writing Clojure. Vim for terminal editing, and Textmate for everything else.

Kenan 15y ago

I'm on Windows. I use Notepad++ virtually everyday. I only use Visual Studio for my C# projects, and other than that I do everything in Notepad++. Eclipse is for my only Java project.

bch 15y ago

Emacs and nvi -- so emacs and "other". If I cared a bit more, I'd say the common notion vim=="everything vi" pisses me off. Default installs of vim w/ their (to my sensibilities) hideous highlighting and bracket-jumping cursor are off-putting. I want my (n)vi to just stay out of the way.

extraevery 15y ago

Vico is awesome (it's like vim and textmate in one)

dbrmr 15y ago

Notepad2

aravindj 15y ago

In windows I use Notepad++. In linux I use gedit with Darkmate theme.

MattJ100 15y ago

I use nano, 99% of the time. I gave details last time a post like this came up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376321 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376321

sethish 15y ago

I'm surprised that more people don't mention bash tools, or gnu if that is the proper name for them. I edit more text files using a combination of ack-grep, cat, sed and pipes than my primary editor (Vim). I had a hard time understanding how one of my coworkers doesn't use a project-wide find (ack-grep, grep, find, &etc). One of my coworkers uses github's search for our repo. Bizarre, but works really well for him.

johncoltrane 15y ago

I just fell in love with Vim after years of TextMate (and BBEdit before and Dreamweaver 3 first). It's powerful, smartly designed, elegant in a weird way… and it works exactly the same on my Ubuntu box at home, on the VPNs I work with and on my Mac at work.

dfc 15y ago
Why wouldn't the same program work the same way on ubuntu, on your VPNs (I'm assuming you mean the machines you connect over a VPN to) and your mac?
- johncoltrane 15y ago
  Sorry, I mistyped VPS. There are many reasons a program wouldn't work across systems. The primary would be that it is a Mac OS X or Windows-only app (TextMate) or that it needs a GUI, or that it makes too many assumptions about the platform it is running on. Vim works on many (if not all) systems, it can be run with or without a GUI without losing or breaking anything, etc. Obviously, Emacs has all the same pros but I liked Vim more. So Vim for me.

mgkimsal 15y ago

vim for small quick shell scripts, and for editing on remote servers (used to be a lot more, not as much these days). intellij for grails work. zend studio and/or vim for php work. visual studio family for .net work.

bugmenot 15y ago

Kwrite. Nano in the console. Why make something harder than it needs to be?

thefox 15y ago

Espresso. http://macrabbit.com/espresso/ http://macrabbit.com/espresso/

huhtenberg 15y ago

Funny enough - Notepad. Aside from having a single step undo, it is a very good editor.

handzhiev 15y ago

Kate. Strange it's not on the list. Anyone else using it?

vasco 15y ago
Yup, all the time. It has some nice plugins and the settings are simple enough. Terminal panel, several files open with splitted screen, it has everything!
jk4930 15y ago
Yes, for everything except editing word documents. :)

GoodIntentions 15y ago

Jed http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/ http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/ Notepad2 http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

ZanderEarth32 15y ago

I switch between CodeRunner and Chocolat. I like both, but don't love either. Will probably pony up for TextMate soon.

FrancescoRizzi 15y ago

TextPad

nirai 15y ago

As a guy who have been using VIM on linux for several years I say this: Check out Komodo Edit! It has made a huge leap since it started. It is an awesome editor for dynamic languages - particularly Python, JS, HTML, etc... It simply does so much right, so do your self a favor and give it a try.

aswanson 15y ago

Can anyone suggest a good (and free) Python development environment?

no_more_death 15y ago
I've done some coding in Eclipse with the PyDev plugin.
- aswanson 15y ago
  Eclipse...man. It's non-intuitive to me. I don't know how to get that IDE working properly.
reefab 15y ago
I use Vim for that but can also recommend Komodo Edit: http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit
amitparikh 15y ago
It's not quite perfect yet, but Python Tools for Visual Studio (http://pytools.codeplex.com/ http://pytools.codeplex.com/) is actually pretty nice. If you're used to the VS IDE, it's not a bad environment for Python development.

samwhiteUK 15y ago

I use nano if it requires editing a file for an install etc, as I am already in terminal. If not, gedit is my goto - i don't use a text editor that much

richardk 15y ago

Eclipse has so many useful features for Java, and once you get used to it it's really not as bad as some people say it is. For any other language I just use gedit where I add line numbers, automatic indentation, current line highlighting, syntax highlighting and word completion.

aw3c2 15y ago

No mention of jEdit makes me sad. It is a cross-platform, highly versatile and FOSS editor with tons of great plugins (for example a minimap, XML syntax checking or auto-completion). http://www.jedit.org/ http://www.jedit.org/

Avshalom 15y ago
I use Vim these days but I've got a lot of fond memories of jEdit, it's a fantastic tool.
was8309 15y ago
jedit here (until someday emacs : "vim scripting" < java < (e)lisp ?)

petercooper 15y ago

Sloppily conflating this poll and the poll and discussion the other day about TDD, the average HN voter can't grok TDD yet is down with vim :-)

jrbaldwin 15y ago

Nano, because openWRT >_<

bialecki 15y ago

Wow, looks like 50% use vim/emacs daily. As a regular Textmate user, I don't have any issues with my workflow, but I have to ask. I use vim/emacs when I do devops, but I don't think I'd want it to be my regular editor. Might be a matter of preference, but just to ask... What're the things I'm missing by not using vim/emacs when I use Textmate? I'd be most helpful if someone could frame an answer in the form of "with Textmate you do..., and then with vim/emacs it's just..."

phamilton 15y ago
V20jd20kp
Derbasti 15y ago
I guess Emacs and Vim get so many mentiones partly because we all want to rationalize the effort we put in to learn and maintain them. Text editors that cost less effort have probably a less profound impact on our lives and thus deserve less discussion. With Textmate you write in Markdown. In Emacs you have org-mode, which is mind-boggingly more powerful. Textmate lacked a code browser last time I checked (not entirely sure there). It does not have Magit or AucTex, either. Last, and certainly not least, simple text navigation and manipulation in Textmate is way inferior to Emacs or particularly Vim. As in: no macros, no incremental regex search and replace, and just a lot less movement and editing commands. Also, a lot less configurable. Well, and Textmate is Mac only of course.
- nocipher 15y ago
  I think the impact of a text editor depends on your daily workflow. I do a lot of system administration and use emacs nearly daily to edit configuration files and write shell scripts. Since almost everything I do involves terminal sessions, a GUI-driven editor is simply unfeasible. I simply could not do my job as efficiently without being a knowledgeable emacs (or vi) user.

fmardini 15y ago

Emacs 24 with evil mode, the best of all worlds

fchollet 15y ago

Aptana (Eclipse-based) for development. OmmWriter for creative writing. TextEdit for quick notes.

ktizo 15y ago

jedit

ricardobeat 15y ago

Used TextMate for a good 2 years, Notepad++ for many years before that. Then I switched to Sublime Text 2 in January and haven't looked back. It's fast, feature rich, supports almost any language via tmbundles, and fixes many quirks that TM had. It just needs a better bundle/plugin manager to be perfect. I code in javascript/coffeescript 90% of the time, but regardless of editor, Zen HTML/CSS is of utmost importance - can't live without it.

emidln 15y ago

vim, because I spent the time years ago learning it and haven't had cause to look back. vim-python is a lifesaver to avoid writing vimscript.

pbsurf 15y ago

SciTE

zengr 15y ago

A poll I conducted on HN last year: http://utkarshsengar.com/2011/03/analysis-your-favourite-text-editoride/ http://utkarshsengar.com/2011/03/analysis-your-favourite-tex...

wazoox 15y ago

I use vim often, but my editor of choice is nedit. I currently host nedit.org, BTW.

jfb 15y ago

Every day for twenty years. Emacs. At one point I was so desperate to run Emacs on a Macintosh that I bought and installed MachTen. If you don't remember MachTen, consider yourself lucky.

ScottBurson 15y ago
Heh, I remember MachTen. Yes, I used it for the same reason. And I've been using Emacs in various of its incarnations since about 1978. (The original ITS Emacs, followed by Zmacs, MINCE, and then Lucid Emacs/XEmacs, the latter still being my preferred variant.)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

LordHog 15y ago

For Windows I used UltraEdit and for Mac I use BBEdit

Metapony 15y ago
This is what I use/would use if I had a Mac. It's all about having a great ability to search directories and filesets.

s00pcan 15y ago

I've used Vim for a year now, daily at work for about 7 months, and still consider myself only a basic to intermediate user of it.

martindale 15y ago

gedit

jvandenbroeck 15y ago

Vim or eclipse with vim bindings, I'm addicted to them. When I'm typing a document in Word I sometimes want to move up a line by pressing 'k'..

joe24pack 15y ago

vim whenever I'm ssh'ed into some remote server, an ide when developing code in a project for work, emacs when playing with lisp, textwrangler when playing on my mac.

MitziMoto 15y ago

I use VIM almost exclusively at work because I do most of my development on a virtual SUSE machine. I do enjoy using Sublime 2 with vintage mode for stuff when I can. I love the accessibility of ctrl+p <filename> to open files quickly. The development environment I still dream of is to somehow merge the linux terminal with something like Sublime 2. If I could have a separate Sublime tab open that I could use as a terminal, I would easily pay for that. Can one of you guys who is a lot smarter than me go ahead and build that? Thanks.

wuub 15y ago
I'm trying to do exactly that (embed a terminal, not make you pay for it) with https://github.com/wuub/SublimePTY https://github.com/wuub/SublimePTY, but the progress has slowed down to a stop lately because of humongous pileup at work. You can also try SublimeREPL [https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL] / Shell for now, but it's good only for very basic stuff as SublimeREPL does not aim to be a terminal emulator at all.

RexRollman 15y ago

When using Windows, I like using Notepad2. In Unix-like OSes, I generally go with Nvi, or Vim if that is not available.

read_wharf 15y ago

I use Vim because I've always used vi/Vim.

johndbritton 15y ago

nano

mikehoward 15y ago

I use TexMate for Rails; emacs for Lisp & other stuff; and vi for quick git edits and things like that (also remote edits)

bsoist 15y ago

I use vim and Textmate every day. I like vim for it's speed, but I do use Textmate a lot for it's project mode and for a lot of markdown and xhtml - just out of habit really.

tylerlh 15y ago

Nice to see all the love for Sublime Text 2 here. Definitely got my vote.

davvid 15y ago

I was helping my friend edit his website yesterday. He's an illustrator/character designer and needed a text editor on Tiger (old laptop) for editing html/css/etc. We tried very hard to find an editor that wasn't vim. I looked around.. textmate sounded nice but it was only free for 30 days. Lots of other apps simply didn't run on Tiger. So we ended up downloading macvim. He picked it up and was able to be productive the same night with very little coaching. Coincidentally, he has wrist pain from mouse abuse so having a keyboard-centric interface is incredibly helpful. I'm a vim expert and my gut feeling to avoid vim ended up being completely wrong: he had no problem understanding it and was almost immediately productive. Thank you macvim developers for not forgetting about the little guys with old OSes!

Vitaly 15y ago
Your editor is such a central part of the workflow that I really can't see how you can choose something else if the one you like better costs just 50$. You will be using it for countless hours, so if you really liked TextMate more then vim I'd say go and buy it. That being said, I use Vim, and I do have licensed TextMate. In fact we have bought 6 licenses for TextMate but not using them as we all switched back to vim.
- jannes 15y ago
  I think you might have overlooked this bit: He's an illustrator/character designer and needed a text editor on Tiger (old laptop) for editing html/css/etc. It doesn't sound like it's a "central part" of his workflow, so that's why he didn't want to buy an editor.
  - Vitaly 15y ago
    well, a designer that needs to edit html/css sound like a part of a full-design-stack solution to me. which means he does edit it for a non trivial amount of time, so something like TextMate or Coda might fit the bill pretty well. If you are doing anything in a professional capacity (i.e. getting payed for it) then even a very slight improvement in productivity will pay for it self almost immediately when we are talking about a 50$ price tag.

shenberg 15y ago

I'm surprised no-one mentioned Source Insight - it's by far the best editor I've used for truly large C/C++ code-bases - doing symbol lookups almost instantly on a source tree eating up several GBs on the drive was extremely impressive when I was introduced to the software in 2004 (admittedly, the rest of the world has caught up on this one), but what made it great is the pervasiveness of using that capability - there is a separate window which shows the context of the symbol your cursor is currently on, instantly updating when the cursor moves, giving you for every symbol its context at a glance. That alone is so useful I miss it still (MSVC has had the almost equivalent 'code definition' pane for a while, but it's so slow to update it's still effectively useless). Also, to this day it seems like the only code editor that I've seen which doesn't use monospaced fonts, and better yet, utilizes that properly (for example, parentheses vary slightly in size according to nesting level, so it's easy to see at a glance which parentheses match).

Metapony 15y ago

I use Windows, so I am using IDM's UEStudio, which isn't on the list. (There's a less feature rich version called UltraEdit, too.) It's the only windows text editor I've found that has features akin to BBEdit (which I haven't used since the old dot-com days back in 2000.)

dblock 15y ago

Redcar

drinchev 15y ago

Sublime Text 2 works perfectly for me. It has TextMate compatibility for syntax bundles, so now my LESS files display pretty in the editor. I've been using TextMate not long ago, but there is no port on Windows. ST 2 has windows and OSX version.

Vitaly 15y ago

Using vim for the last 10 years or so. Had switched to TextMate for about a year in 2005 when started doing Rails, but went back to vim quickly afterwards. Tried to switch to sublime2 lately, but its far far from being ready. may be one day. Vim is old. Way too old I'd say. And has absolutely hideous extension language, horrible internal API and looks like crap. Sadly nothing still comes close to replace it for me.

intelekshual 15y ago
What makes you say Sublime Text 2 is far from being ready? It's relatively stable for a beta product, has an impressive list of features and is highly extensible; not to mention it's being actively developed, unlike some other editors. Just curious how you reached the conclusion that is isn't "ready".

ZeWaren 15y ago

I use butterflies. http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/ And also, vim.

christiangenco 15y ago

Started in TextWrangler/BBEdit, saw the light and moved to TextMate, ended up switching the default application for about twenty filetypes to open in TextMate, and lived merrily for about four years. I've always been scared of Vim, so a few months ago I decided to learn it but never used it full-time (quite handy for remote editing, though). I'm currently in the transition to Sublime Text 2 after it being recommended to me at a hackathon, but there are still a handful of things (markdown editing, better find/replace dialog) in TextMate that keep it in my dock. I still use TextMate for writing papers or letters out of habit (though subl's distraction-free editing is quite tempting).

trurl123 15y ago

I am using FAR Manager every day to edit text files.

fisadev 15y ago

vim, with lots of interesting plugins :) (my config: http://code.google.com/p/fisa-vim-config/ http://code.google.com/p/fisa-vim-config/ )

jarrodtaylor 14y ago

I've been a fan of Chocolat lately. Simple, straightforward and easy on the eyes. http://chocolatapp.com/ http://chocolatapp.com/

amk 14y ago

I keep hearing good things about Sublime, but I had no idea it was this popular. Maybe it's time to switch from Notepad++

jilebedev 14y ago

Each day, you arrive to work, sit in a chair, and focus on Python programming. After five years, you're a pretty damned experienced Python developer: you've become wiser, more efficient, and generally more productive. But ... you're still no better at chair sitting. You've done just as much chair sitting as you have programming, but you've barely progressed in chair sitting. But that's different, you say - programming languages are open and complex, with many libraries to explore, blog posts and stack exchange threads to read, and many fun side projects to fiddle with myself. Heh, that's the key. A programming language doesn't limit your growth, your self-betterment. A chair does limit your growth: it's a simple tool, and there's not much improving in chair sitting after you've fiddled with the levers for five minutes. I use vim because it's a programing language, not a chair. I consistently learn better ways of editing text in vim. I'm not advocating vim here, so much as I am advocating to thoughtfully examine an activity you do often (text editing) and then looking at the tool you're using (text editor) and asking: am I constantly learning better ways to accomplish my goals?

joeyespo 14y ago

Crimson Editor. It has a very fast startup time, even on older machines. Also, its syntax highlighting is simple enough to add new languages. Including your own toy language. This helps tremendously when you're still exploring potential syntax.

milliams 14y ago

Kate