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Comment by nimz | Hacker News Reader

Great to hear and congratulations to the team. Amazing persistence. I used to be a huge Textmate fan - it was so revolutionary in its time. Unfortunately, I think it is too late. The Google Trends comparison of Textmate, Sublime Text and VS Code tells the story: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

View on HN

There I fixed it for you https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

That may indicate vim users googling for how-to guides.

Don’t forget emacs of course: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Looks like Emas used to rule the roost but then died away. What really piques my interest is why those of us in Wyoming (and the Dakota’s and Alaska) and apparently love Vim:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22textmate%22,%2...

Because vim is great for cowboy coding? (I've been using vim for decades)

Emacs takes a fair bit of commitment in time and practice to use it well. In these days of 40 hour work weeks, and life long beginner stage programmers. You won't be seeing its usage grow.

I'd even go to an extent and say vim trends show supply of intermediate level programmers. Emacs trends show supply of expert programmers. The fact that those trends are in a downward direction tells a story in itself.

Absolute numbers could be up, even if relative share is down. Intel reported growth in fortran compiler sales, but python does grow more, so relative numbers are what you expect.

That may indicate users googling how to exit vim.

Funny, because it's true.

Some are still stuck up to this day.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=e...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=how%20to%20exit%2...

Let's include something more standard for comparison.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

I can now announce that this is the best HN discussion of 2019.

There. Fixed even more: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... . And if we take into consideration various versions of how to spell (for example vscode), Visual Studio code dominates even more.

When I was starting with vim, I was searching for 'vim [something]' a lot, from plugins to configurations, trying to improve the experience. I have since switched back to Atom and now to VSCode.

I don't search 'vscode [something]' nearly as much. Most of the configuration options are explained in the interface (both the visual one and `settings.json`). I can find plugins right from the editor and that usually also includes essential information about working with the plugin.

I still use barebones vim for commit messages, and I still find myself looking for how to trigger the spelling suggestions. I never seem to recall the `z=` when I need it.

Just because something is less user-friendly and requires more knowledge or looking for help, it doesn't mean it's more popular.

The Stack Overflow developer survey is probably a more representative sample: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-....

BBedit. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

I think the relevance of these graphs is quite limited by Google's UI (which doesn't allow for wildcarding nor combining results)

See for example: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

It’s possible that native graphical editors will increase in popularity at some point. There’s probably a niche of people who don’t like the potentially poor performance of Electron-based editors but don’t want to learn (or find that they dislike) terminal-based editors like Vim and Emacs. Who knows? Google Trends isn’t an accurate way to tell the popularity of programming languages either.

Sublime Text, is native, isn't?

Sure, much of the API and all the plugin stuff is in Python, but the core is all native C++ AFAIK.

It’s also declining according to the chart, but you’re right that it’s both native and way more popular than TextMate.

I found that ggl trends graphs for tech topics usually decline over time and I attribute it to more non-technical crowd becoming netizens and thus technical topics will usually seem declining.

Its native but cross platform so many Mac purists don’t consider it as “native” as TextMate, which is built specifically for the Mac and doesn't compromise on standard Mac UI idioms.

Having said that, if they had known all the modern alternatives were going to be even less “native” amd run in a browser engine, they'd probably have been less nitpicky.

Eh, as a macOS user until recently, I found Sublime Text to be a very integrated application. Appearance and behavior was exactly as I'd expect from modern macOS applications.

It may not be heavy on archaic Mac features such as AppleScript integration, but I hope we can all agree to ignore those technologies.

TextMate just brings memories of the 10.4 Tiger days.

Right. I’m referring to 5 to 7 years ago when Sublime 2 was still young.

I personally liked ST2 but I know that some people held their nose.

TextMate never had AppleScript integration, AFAIK.

Also, I'm not convinced we should ignore those "archaic" technologies, at least in the abstract. Applications can provide "dictionaries" of commands that, when implemented well, provide GUI applications with the kind of "snap together for amazing effect" you get with shell scripts and a host of well-written CLI tools. You arguably can't script the AppleScript-intensive BBEdit to the same level that you could, say, Emacs or Vim, but imagine the possibilities of a suite of apps from different makers that all had complete scripting dictionaries that could all be woven together with a deep system-wide scripting language.

I actually think it's a shame that AppleScript has been kicked to the curb. I don't think we have a "modern" replacement yet -- certainly not in the Apple ecosystem, and I'm not sure anywhere else. (Shortcuts on iOS is trying, but it's not on the Mac yet, and it gets pretty clunky if you start doing overly complicated automation bits with it.)

AppleScript is a great idea in how everything is scriptable.

Unfortunately, the language itself is a horrible abomination from the wild 1990s days of Mac OS... sorry, now macOS... and writing absolutely anything in it is painful.

I feel like Apple introduced Automator to overcome the pain of AppleScript, but it never really caught on (I don't even know if Automator is still on macOS.... yep it is, still with the cute Aquaesque icon)

Nowadays everything is Electron anyway and those are not that well AppleScript-able, but what to do, that's life

"AppleScript" can do JS now, but it's so clunky and badly documented that it's barely worth it.

JXA, like Scripting Bridge before it, was shipped crippled and buggy and abandoned once it was out the door. Apple finally disbanded the Mac Automation team and fired the PM responsible a couple years ago.

In fact, there are several production-tested Apple event bridges that totally wipe the floor with Apple’s failed attempts, but caveat emptor as I don’t do support:

http://appscript.sourceforge.net https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodeautomation https://hhas.bitbucket.io/welcome.html

We’ll see what happens when Shortcuts lands in 10.16, but I’d say the chances of Apple event automation having a long and healthy life ahead are 50/50, at best.

I think AppleScript and Automator is/will be deprecated and the replacement would be Shortcuts present on iOS.

I think the main developer of AppleScript left Apple last year.

I think I read something on these lines on HN, I may be remembering things slightly wrong

The language itself is pretty bonkers, to be sure. I think the Amiga probably did this better with ARexx, simply because Rexx was much better for "friendly scripting language." I was going to say I'd made my peace with AppleScript, but it'd be more honest to say "I've gotten better at beating AppleScript into submission."

iOS Workflow/Shortcuts is what Automator should have been in a lot of ways. If Automator was superseded by a macOS version of Shortcuts, I'd actually love it, as long as it didn't lose any of Automator's functionality. (All they'd really need to do is add Shortcuts that run AppleScripts and shell scripts, I think, and be able to use automator actions exposed by applications.)

Expect Shortcuts to land in 10.16. Most of the plumbing’s already in 10.15; it’s just not public yet.

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/11359563313603461...

I love Applescript. Not necessarily the language but what you can do with it is great. It's one thing that's keeping me on Mac--there's no Windows equivalent, much less a Linux equivalent. You can kind of hack stuff with Autohotkey but that's not the same thing at all.

>Eh, as a macOS user until recently, I found Sublime Text to be a very integrated application. Appearance and behavior was exactly as I'd expect from modern macOS applications.

Compare the file browsers and find dialogs and the difference is night and day.

Yes! Sublime Text certainly has the functionality, but the search/replace UX is a big part of what keeps me going back to BBEdit for technical writing.

TextMate is native and modern.

Depends on what you mean by "native". The core is compiled to a native binary. But it doesn't use macOS native text editing or UI idioms beyond the level of windows and menus. If you don't want to use TextMate, you might as well use Visual Studio Code instead, which is closer in spirit to the native Mac idioms and is easier to configure.

I'm not well versed on the specific implementation details of ST, but whatever the ST team does on macOS yields a result that is much closer to a native application than VSCode does through embedded Chromium. The difference in text rendering is particularly noticeable on a non-hidpi display.

Sublime Text is C++ expect for the plugins part. And they have put years to optimize it. It beats everything when it comes to performance, memory, and power consumption.

The only fight it can't win over VSCode is the extensions and ecosystem.

Emacs is not by any stretch terminal-based. It can work in a terminal, but it also fully supports graphical environments. In fact, I dare say that most Emacs users use the graphical rather than the terminal version.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWQB_9QcGI0

I would consider myself an Emacs user and I use the graphical version too. With the exception of the menu bar and toolbar, Emacs seems to be graphical but not a graphical user interface, if that makes sense. It is still primarily a text-based application controlled through the keyboard. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach, but my litmus test is if you lose a significant amount of functionality by using the terminal version instead of the graphical version, it’s graphical. I don’t really lose anything (and I don’t think most people do) when running emacs -nw.

Actually you lose quite a lot, which is of course everything that requires a graphical environment. Examples include smooth pixel-based scrolling (see my other reply below), extensive image support everywhere (e.g. EWW/elfeed/GNUS/Org) which includes animations, PDF viewing (native on macOS), true color / SRGB, SVG rendering, better font support including emojis on macOS and multiple frames.

Maybe you don't care about any of these but don't tell me you don't really lose anything.

No smooth scrolling is a deal breaker for a lot of people I'm guessing

It does have smooth scrolling. On macOS (Emacs mac port), it's the same inertia-based scrolling that every other system app is using and on Linux pixel-based smooth scrolling was added for Emacs 26.

Smooth scrolling equivalent of editors are bulk editing commands, keyboard macros and Elisp etc.

Yea, I try VSCode every so often, but I keep coming back to Vim in my terminal for the majority of my editing, but I actually have been using TextMate 2 (before release) as my GUI editor of choice. It’s simple, fast, and gets the job done.

If I wasn’t writing so much Python, I’d say I have a type.

> It’s possible that native graphical editors will increase in popularity at some point

Panic seems prepared to take that bet, with their development of Nova [1], a replacement for Coda.

[1] https://www.panic.com/nova/

It better be way, way better than Sublime Text is the plan is to charge Panic prices. Their apps are best of breed but this is a crowded space and they’re competing with free.

I mean, Sublime costs Panic prices. It just doesn't care that much if you abuse its trial.

(Wait, maybe I'm misreading your comment. Are you trying to say "Sublime is free, so Nova will have to be way better to compete with Sublime" or "Sublime wasn't good enough to justify its price, so Nova will have to be way better than that to justify its price"?)

Not the parent poster, but I'd agree that Nova would have to be pretty close to revolutionary to even get me to consider it.

People invest a lot of time into their existing text editors. For many people (myself included) a potential replacement would have to be more than a little better, because otherwise it's not worth the somewhat large cost (in terms of time spent on setup+mastery) of switching.

Panic also has a tendency to create something, and then neglect it for ages, which includes their previous editor...

They just have too many products than what they can focus on...

They seem to be doing okay with Coda already?

I can't say I've ever met anyone who actually uses Coda. Does it appeal more to the Dreamweaver crowd? (No offence to anyone who uses Coda, or Dreamweaver, or anything else!)

I used to use Coda and Coda 2 - I loved them, and they were true "Mac" apps. But I switched to Sublime and Vim for one reason alone - Cmd-T/Ctrl-P fuzzy file opener.

That one feature makes such a difference to me as I switch between big project trees that I can't do without it.

I'd happily pay Panic for Nova if they add that back in.

Coda does have "quick open," with ^Q, doesn't it?

(Ironically, as I get more deeply into Vim, I've found the :find and :buffer commands to be faster and just as useful as the CtrlP plugin, even if they're not quite as forgivingly fuzzy.)

^Q isn't as fuzzy as I'd like it - I do a lot of rails work and being able to type apvwpeopsho to match app/views/people/show.html.erb is really useful

FWIW, I met folks from Panic when Coda was first released, back when the Macworld Expo was a thing, and said -- honestly -- that the program struck me as "Dreamweaver without the suck." They joked it was a shame they couldn't use that as a tagline.

Coda is more like VS Code and Sublime Text in some ways, but it definitely has Dreamweaver's "one stop shop for big web sites" thing going. (BBEdit also has that to a large degree, despite being even more of a pure HTML/text editor.) The biggest liability Coda has is that it feels designed for a time when we were primarily building sites out of hand-coded HTML; like BBEdit, it really isn't optimized for working on MVC-based apps, whether server-side or front-end.

You might like to follow OniVim2: https://onivim.io

It is native, cross platform, and not based on Electron. It also uses Vim as the core editing engine.

If not Electron, is it native or does it use some other web engine?

It uses the authors' own Revery [0] framework, based on ReasonML and GLFW. So there's Javascript in the stack, but no Chromium.

[0] https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

ReasonML does not imply JavaScript - it can compile natively using the OCaml native compilers - and that's exactly what Revery does. GLFW is also native/C.

> It is native

It isn’t native in this context; As a sibling comment mentioned, OniVim2 uses revery[0], which uses it’s own widgets (not native ones) like flutter[1].

Quoting from my old comment[2]:

> We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch.

> Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y.

[0] https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

[1] https://github.com/revery-ui/revery/blob/master/README.md#de...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612195

I'll adopt whatever definition you want "native" to mean for the discussion - and under your definition of native, I would say it's pretty clear that users of text editors and developer tools don't care much at all about "native"(your definition of using the platform provided widgets). Just look at the market share of developer tools and IDEs/editors that don't use stock platform widgets. They are the ones that have become dominant. The problems that people have with the dominant players that have gained traction is the performance. You might be able to make the case that using stock widgets matters for non-developer tools (and I would only partially agree there), but for developer tools when people say they want "native" they are more likely to mean they want the performance that more often comes with natively compiled languages without a VM. It makes sense that developers would trade stock platform-widgets in exchange for an editor with greater cross platform reach because users of these tools benefit from network effects of these tools having wider reach. They want someone to have written the plugin/extension they're looking for.

Personally, I'm not looking to increase the ways that I'm locked into my current operating system, so all else equal, I'd favor an editor that runs everywhere.

FWIW personally with "native" i mean "native widgets too, where possible". It isn't always possible and i'm ok with that, but if your application uses a text edit area, a treebox for project files, a menu bar, a bunch of tabs and perhaps a toolbar (the "standard" IDE layout -AFAIK- introduced by MSVC4 back in the 90s and replicated by pretty much every IDE and most "programming" text editors since then) then every mainstream (and most niche) desktop OS outside of Linux/X11 has native widgets that provide 99% of the functionality (with that missing 1% being the text edit area itself and some minor UI stuff).

(and also FWIW, of all text editors personally i use Notepad++ on Windows and Geany on Linux - though as i really dislike Gtk3 and Geany switched to that, i'm looking for some alternative that uses a more snappy and lightweight toolkit - for now the Debian version i use is still on Gtk2 but that is just a matter of time to be replaced)

Under that definition of "native", it's pretty clear developers don't care very much about having "native" text editors/IDEs, wouldn't you agree? You can look at editor usage to see how they are voting.

Yeah most developers probably do not care, but it isn't like nobody cares (for example i do and i read comments like mine on HN often, so there are others who do too). At least when it comes to text editors there are options and you can use whatever you want regardless of what a complacent majority votes for :-P.

Though i also believe that the functionality some people want from their applications is only available on (what i see as) applications with inferior UIs and they'd rather get used to these UIs than not have the functionality - that is, their vote is for the functionality, not for the UI.

The other thing to consider is that developers spend up to ten hours a day in these editors. The biggest benefits of OS-coherent UI is that an application is quickly learnable for the first week. But when you use an editor for multiple years, all day long, many would trade that for increased customizability.

> There’s probably a niche of people who don’t like the potentially poor performance of Electron-based editors

Haven't noticed any performance problems with VS Code, since I started using it everyday maybe 3 years ago. I switched from Intellij based editors to VS Code and before that I used vim for a decade.

600 MB memory usage with just one small text file open IS a performance problem imo (but I agree the app doesn't feel slow).

Especially on MACs were RAM is priced at a premium.

On Windows I developed a small program that sums the ram usage of my browsers and Electron apps I use. Between Firefox, Chromium and VSCode it's frequently around 4 GB of ram ! That's insane just to basically browse text.

A niche? Tons of people use non-Electron/web based graphical editors.

Visual Studio, Sublime Text, TextMate, BBEdit, SlickEdit, Notepad++, XCode, Vim, Emacs, heck, one could add IntelliJ into the mix...

Indeed, but not the whole story ;)

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Would be interesting to know which percentage of vim searches are for vim keybindings in other editors. (i know several people who use vim keybindings, but don't know anywone who uses vim itself)

Or, people searching for how to exit vim.

A little off topic: but when I was in uni our instructors insisted that we use vim for all of our development during the freshman year CS courses. Did everyone actually use it? Of course not, but a significant amount of class time was spent teaching keybindings, macros, etc.

I really built a habit of vanilla vim usage, and to this day I have yet to find a "modern" text editor that really supports everything that vim has to offer i.e. "vim mode" being more than binding the arrow keys to hjkl and providing modes.

I've found a lot support most of the standard modes / commands but not vim scripts (and partial ex mode quite often) . Which is often fine as extended functionality often comes through the host editor/ides native capabilities. The advantage being they can leverage things that just don't exist in Vim.

Hmm good point, when looking for a place to retire look for Vim searches!

wow what is up with alaska 100% vim!! what a state

Wow, I had no idea how much the relative stature of Vim and Emacs had changed over my career.

switching those from "search terms" to "topics" tells a different story

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

(and if you keep it to search terms but swap "visual studio code" for "vscode" you see a simialar rise)

The topics aren't perfect either, unfortunately. For example, Sublime Text, as we know it, was first released in 2008 while the topic trends data you linked shows it being the leader in 2004.

As an aside, I added vim and vi to the trends, which dwarf the others, but show a long and slow decline for `vi`, but a fairly steady state for `vim`. As a vim user that at times wishes he learned emacs instead of vim, emacs is an interesting trend to see: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="...

How much of that is just users searching "how to exit vim" though? :)

Half-joking, but I think it is actually over-estimating the vim user base because there are so many things to search when learning to use vim, whereas the others are much closer to a traditional word processors.

Keep in mind that "vi" has meaning outside of text editors.

Very true and likely, also considering how short the terms are, but emacs is in clear decline. Perhaps it's just become so easy to use, no one needs to search for anything anymore?

vi usage is here to stay, even if not heavy usage, some one has to always change something in a file on a server and has to use vi.

Apart from that, Emacs usage mostly correlates how much of text heavy tasks a programmer is doing. Most people tend to write tons of shell/perl/python scripts and take a lot of time recreate the magic of emacs outside it, Sadly most of it is also throw away effort with a lots of manual effort in between. Sometimes its entirely manual effort because eventually you need to learn Perl regexes, or sed or awk really well, and that's another black hole in itself. To me that's kind of a gap in developer training itself. If you are wasting man-hours to weeks doing what should be done in man-minutes you probably have a huge gap in the way you are used to thinking about how your work in general.

Growth of Python is a big problem for programming community at large. It's a tool largely designed for beginners and people refuse to move beyond that. What's worse they also carry that kind of thinking to any tool they want to use.

Developers are generally bad at automating our own work. We wish to liberate accountants and ware house workers from drudgery. But rarely do we look at our own very work the very same way.

Pode Vim, an album by Pedro Kimura is popular in Brazil.

Using git with vim also seems a popular search combo.

Personally I am amazed that the younger generation are keen to learn vim. I don't see why as I have gone the other way to only use phpStorm for editing in earnest. For me using vim for code instead of phpStorm is a bit like handwriting instead of typing, a definite loss of formatting and neatness.

The reason I find modern interest in vim so amusing is that there is no compelling excuse to use it. In the olden days when you had to queue to use a terminal in a computer room to enter code you had handwritten on paper there were no 'nano' or other editors, you had to learn and use vi.

I don't believe vi is quicker than a full size IDE but I still use vi, find and grep because I don't fully trust these new IDE tools and I am fairly dyed in the wool as a command line user.

The tools I don't fully understand are the textmate, sublime, notepad++ and other middling editors that don't offer the brilliance of vim or the possibilities of a phpStorm grade editor.

It's available on servers. It's fast to manipulate text with. It doesn't spin up my CPU (cough electron editors). It never falls over on me. Basically it just gets out of my way.

Even if I don't use Vim much anymore, there are things that I would still do it Vim because it just does them faster.

but phpstorm is just for php, right? what if you want to code in some rust, does it support it? with just a few tweaks and packages sublime turns into a half-decent editor for any language and stack.

I believe Sublime does offer the brilliance of vim. And I use vim too! They take about the same time to configure to similar levels of usability. Sometimes a more native UI is preferable. Notepad++ has a bit more built-in. There's some Windows particular stuff where I might want that Win 2000 aesthetic. I'm thankful for all the options.

I'm curious, why phpStorm specifically and not IntelliJ or any other jetbrains IDE?

Obviously its php specific features aren't relevant here since we're discussing editors (or development environments) in general.

Personally I find that most IDEs are far too language specific, and I can't possibly invest the time to learn an IDE per language when there's so many languages I regularly need to edit (and probably yet more in the future).

VSCode isn't half bad, as it has plugins for just about everything, but it's still a juggernaut in terms of software size. None of the jetbrains product I've used had decent plugins for all the languages I need.

And of course none of these work over a purely terminal ssh connection, which is a bit of a deal breaker for me.

What features are you using in phpStorm that you think are missing from vim?

Definitely not trying to convince you to use vim over your favourit IDE, I'm just currious what your top 10 missing features are.

I tried adding Notepad++ to this comparison but google filtered it to mean "notepad". Lame.

Works if you search for each software as a "topic" instead of the (exact) queries.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

I hope sublime doesn't die off (or fade into obscurity)

I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

I believe the uptake of typed langs (typescript) is what drives peeps to look beyond sublime.

They blew it, plain and simple. Development went dark, VS Code swept in and took its place. Sad.

At least VS Code and TextMate are free and open-source software. Sublime is basically dead and there's no chance of a fork.

> Jumped ship to Sublime when it was released because it was evolving much quicker. Was glad to have backwards compat on a lot of things like themes. Still have my modified “Made or Code” theme kicking today. Tried TM2 a ton during the betas but never managed to reach the same level of productivity as Sublime. My muscle memory is too strong now and I can’t find any reason to leave.

That's an interesting comparison. I completely agree that VSCode is the rage right now. Sublime was big 2014-2016. I'm surprised atom isn't as popular (I suspect its because of the awful loading time)

That’s why I never switched from Sublime to Atom, the general slowness was just too frustrating. Not just the load time, but things like opening large-ish files or global find/replace. VSCode kind of feels like how Atom should have been, fully featured with lots of great plugins but also snappy. I still keep Sublime in my toolbox in case I have to open a huge file or something.

Atom is more popular than those listed:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

"atom" probably includes searches for the particle, not just the editor, so not really fair comparison.

Also "vs code" trends higher than "visual studio code", so take all of these results with a pinch of salt.

If you look it says "Atom - Text Editor"

But if you select "Visual Studio Code - Text Editor", then that one becomes the most popular - see link I posted above

That graph shows it was almost as popular in 2004 as it is today, so obviously that term isn't just referring to the editor. (since it wasn't released until 2015)

Except for the fact that you can “type hint” your query term (in this case, Atom: Text Editor), which the referenced URL does.

If you select the appropriate topics as opposed to raw search terms, you get a very different picture https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Nah, I just tried it out and it's great. One of the few good lightweight editors on macos, and might make me ditch vim since i never needed most of its functions. Popularity doesn't really mean much.

Also interesting the decline of Emacs and the stability of vim: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Too late for what?

Dominance of the text editor market. TextMate was pretty meh, Coda I tried and thought was ridiculously overpriced for its total lack of features. Sublime was great for its time, I even paid for a license, but Atom is just too good for its value (free).

But apparently VS Code is becoming extremely popular. I wonder if its literally just because of GitLens (still missing from other text editors).

Disclaimer: RubyMine / IntelliJ for life.

I do most of my development work in Jetbrains IDEs and am a huge fan but if you don't keep the environment open 100% of the time it takes a long time to bootstrap. texmate is great for fast one offs

So keep it open all the time? Are you really working on more than one serious project at a time?

I use Atom for my quickie projects here and there, but you really can't beat an IDE. (IMO)

I usually have three instances of IntelliJ open at the same time with large Java projects in them. One I'm working in, another a colleague is asking me questions about, another to lookup some related code, et cetera.

CPU use is negligible and I have plenty of RAM.

Far more than GitLens. Integrated terminal, for example. You can add database tools, Docker tools, etc. The relatively recent addition of SFTP is a first class implementation.

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