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Best Text Editors

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17 pointstpimental18 comments

IMO, emacs wins just for it's sheer flexibility.

Yeah, it sucks at first, but if you're a professional text wrangler, you owe it to yourself to try to master one of the big two (emacs or vim)...

I kept trying out emacs, getting scared off, trying it out again, scaring away again... But I always came back because other text editors annoyed me with their lack of ability to do exactly precisely what I wanted.

With emacs, whatever I want to do... It's just another line of lisp in .emacs. Or sometimes another package in .emacs.d and another line in .emacs...

I don't think it sucks much at first at all... Most people I know that have a hard time with emacs don't want to learn anything fancy and think the arrow keys are fine for navigation. Let them watch you program for a few minutes and they'll be so impressed that they'll happily learn the new commands. OR, they're not cut out for technology anyway...

I had a bit of trouble with it at first, until I realized that I was supposed to be pulling it apart and making it bend to my every editing whim.

The combination of keyboard-focused editing, on-the-fly extensibility, and decently thorough and clear documentation has made emacs my editor of choice for just about everything.

Not to mention that you can get a constant source of ideas to code to keep yourself sharp, if that's your sort of thing.

Now I'm not much of a programmer, so the answer may be obvious to some of you, but why wasn't SciTE on the list? It's lightweight and does everything I need it to. Maybe the others are just so much better than the rest.

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

I am using SciTE again. I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 and started using GEdit. But, I was really annoyed with the text selection in GEdit (programming in Python) and I missed replace within selection in GEdit. So, I switched back to SciTE.

I'm still using SciTE on my work PC too. I tried E, which is supposed to be like TextMate - but it was a poor immitation, imho.

As for me I just love TextMate. "E" is a good alternative on Windows platform.

Emacs works nicely on Windows now too, and with a decent installer.

I have used pretty much all of those and then some (e, EditPlus, Komodo, etc) over several years and the best the only one I finally fell in love with was VIM.

Actually decided to use Vim cause my "e" trial expired and I have never looked back. Been using it for a few months and text editing is so fluent, easy and intuitive despite the strong learning curve. Take an hour or so each day (or every few days) and do a chapter on the 500 page Vim book.

EditPlus is a good one for windows development

Been using UltraEdit for years and still love it on the PC, using TextMate on my Mac. I'm a bit surprised BBEdit isn't on there - it seemed to be the perennial fav for mac users for years.

How does UE compare to TM? I have never used TM before, but apparently E is the one to compare with? I was a diehard UE fan for a couple of years.

What's wrong with using an IDE like eclipse or Visual Studio? That's what I do.

From the article: "From managing our to-do lists and writing code to jotting ideas and keeping a grocery list, nothing beats a solid plain text editor." Do you write all your text in an IDE?

And: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72774

I write code in an IDE and other text in notepad. I've never felt the need for any other type of editor. Those fit my needs quite alright.

C-x b is my notepad.

:tabnew is mine.

Vim on my linux box. InType if I have to drop down to Windows.

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