[Follow-up Results] Your favourite text editor/IDE? | Hacker News Reader

[Follow-up Results] Your favourite text editor/IDE?

utkarshsengar.com

36 pointszengr50 comments

Is Vim having some kind of resurgence of late?

I've been a vi/vim user for 10+ years now but it seems like its popularity has really started shooting up in the last couple of years.

At least in the Ruby community (where most developers are on Macs), it seems to be due to TextMate's lack of progress.

A few years ago, it seemed like most Ruby developers were using TextMate, but as TextMate 2 got pushed farther and farther back (and started to look like vaporware and/or bloatware), they started to look around for something with the power of TextMate but with more extensibility.

Some IDEs and a few TextMate extensions started to pop up, but I think it was a timely post by Jamis Buck that inspired a lot of Ruby developers to make the switch to Vim, then PeepCode came out with some stuff, then it snowballed from there: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/10/10/coming-home-to-vim

You could be the official Ruby historian.

It doesn't happen only in the Ruby community. A lot of people are switching.

The hacker in me wanted something more raw and more powerful and I switched for Vim which is amazing IMHO compared to TextMate. Others are moving to Coda or Espresso. TM2 has to be VERY good to make all of us come back.

I started using it maybe three years ago, and so did a friend of mine. The only reason was "we should probably check it out". I'm guessing the real reason was that there was a lot of buzz about it back than, and there still is.

(It's funny, half the time I do something original, everyone else is doing the same thing)

I recently converted back to Vim for all my non-.NET work (and Visual Studio is configured with Vim keybindings). I like having a single editor that I can use across platforms.

Why isnt the data sorted from most voted to less? Its a big mess to read graphs like that...

How is this different from just running a poll on HN? No analysis?

I would have at least liked to have been able to see how many people voted for the various other options.

This, plus, for example Scala appears in "others" like 4 or 5 times, why not put it together?

Also, why no relation between language and text editor and IDE?

Lots of opportunity for analysis too.

I would have liked to see the most common combos (eg: which percentage said "Vim + Ruby" or "Java + Eclipse" or even "Emacs + Eclipse").

Not really an analysis, but interesting nonetheless. Note that this only tells us about the uses of (some) HN members, and remember that the use of a particular IDE may make the user more vocal about the fact they use it.

Any suggestions to make it more interesting? Also, renaming it to RESULTS then :)

You can say that it;s just a sample set from high focus group (like HN members, who are tech savvy, use multiple languages and tools)

Sort the results by popularity.

One obvious thing to look at is the link between programming languages and editors/IDEs. Some things seem obvious (Java programmers will probably like Eclipse, .Net programmers are probably more likely to use Notepad++ than vim) but there may be some surprises (one of the comments suggests that Rubyists will like vim, which I hadn't thought of).

It's possible you haven't collected this data; that would be a shame.

I like notepad++ on Windows and vim on linux. for IDE I really like VS, and when did HTML become a programming language??

As told by the blog author in the comments:

" HTML + CSS3 is Turing complete (github.com) – http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300836 "

Further into the comments, it is acknowledged that HTML + CSS is, in fact, not Turing Complete and that the original premise was incorrect.

I want to also add that HTML lacks a fundamental feature of programming languages: means of abstraction. Fortunately, modern software allows us to not have to program directly in HTML and CSS and can abstract the ugly away, programming in languages that are more maintainable than raw HTML. But we have had that for decades; I do not understand the need to legitimize HTML "programming". It might be a misunderstanding of what is actually producing the HTML data.

Further into the comments, it is acknowledged that HTML + CSS is, in fact, not Turing Complete and that the original premise was incorrect.

There is some discussion over what Turing complete means (including a guy confusing complexity with computability and saying that the notion of Turing completeness is nonsense), but no universal acknowledgement of that sort.

One day I will understand the popularity of Vi; until then (and I have used it), I find it so frustrating to use that the first command that always springs to mind is :q!.

I confess I was surprised not to see EditPad register at all; I don't any more have a regular use for it in my work but when I did I found it absolutely superb, and it used to be that I wasn't alone in that opinion. Has it fallen behind that far in the last few years?

Vim has a high learning curve. But once you learn it, it's difficult to use another editor - especially since there are hardly any modal editors out there besides vim.

I went a step further and remap Capslock to Escape on all my systems, thus making me completely inefficient on any other keyboard that's not mine.

Love Komodo IDE. Don't love its price though.

http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide

Interesting (broken) results on the live view[1], PHP has a single vote in the main one but lots of entries in "other".

[1]: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dHhwMm...

The Google excel sheet I have shared is a formatted one, which also includes PHP in the charting. The original excel sheet is one which you see in the "live view". Will fix it when I get some time.

"Hacked News"? HTML as a programming language?

You must be new here :-) Anyway... you'll grow up. Like most of us did.

The data from the report was interesting. One more unanswered question: how many of the people don't use an IDE or use only an IDE?

Haha, my bad, typo (fixed!). Yes, I am new here. Will do some "analysis" in few days. Will keep you guys posted!

Regarding HTML, well the survey is about what editors/ide do you use, not about skill set.

It appears I'm heavily in the Target Demographic for Hacker News readers who respond to posts about their favorite text editors/IDE's.

Developer who uses Vim, Codes mostly in Python and Javascript.

I can't view any of the images -- they seem to have been replaced with this one: http://imageshack.us/img/blocked_login.jpg

That should be fixed now. I have moved the files to my server.

Can you please order the tables and add bar charts?

Vim on Windows looks horrendous. Too bad I can't use it on Windows. Too bad I'm on Windows :|

Are you using gvim or the console version? I've found gvim for windows to be fine.

http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc

Really? I use gvim on Windows all the time. It looks fine - a little 'unixy', but that's practically a feature with Vim.

Try a different setup. Which variant of VIM where you using on Windows ?

I need to use Windows at work but I am using VIM for my daily development needs.

I use Msysgit+Console 2 to get a tabbed shell and use VIM from inside it. I probably used Cygwin to install ctags. I also have gVim but don't use it (one of the reasons -- I don't like the font and haven't found out yet how to change it).

I had to play a little bit until I got my setup working. It is not perfect (mouse scroll does not work inside my shell VIM). But it satisfies me.

To change the font in gVim, set guifont in your .vimrc file

ex. (from mine): set guifont=Courier_New:h8:b:cANSI

However, if you are happy with your current setup, I'm not sure there's a reason to change things just for the gui.

why was the form closed? I would have wanted to wait for more data. Am I missing something?

I have reopened the form. Closed it while I was formatting the data.

I can't even fathom how Eclipse somehow outstrips IDEA, particularly by such a large margin. IDEA destroys Eclipse in terms of usability, looks, features, speed, etc.

Is the premium developers put on "but it's open source!" really that compelling, or is there some key feature of Eclipse that I'm completely missing?

Eclipse is a platform, and a lot of plugins are there to make it usable for your language(s). Where IDEA is only Java, Eclipse lets me do PHP too. As I do both regularly, it's a compelling "feature".

This is a common misconception. IDEA was once "only Java", but it is rapidly becoming a generalized platform, as well. Writing Ruby with IDEA is an absolute delight, for instance,

Interesting. I'll give it a try.

IDEA lets me do Java, PHP, RoR, html, etc. I'd say it's just as much of a platform as Eclipse is, and has a huge number of plug-ins to extend its feature set.

I know a large number of developers that have only used Eclipse, and swear by it. The prime motivation for using it seems to be that it's free.

I hired a couple of them for a gig a while ago, and gave them IDEA licenses so we'd all be running in the same IDE. They were instant converts.

I think the results are reflecting the larger numbers of developers who adopt the best free IDE rather than pay money for one. Might be safe to say it's more of a "what IDE are you using" vs. "best IDE".

It could be because Eclipse supports many languages (through plugins), whereas the (free) community edition of IntelliJ only supports Java. At least, last time I checked.

Notepad++

Textmate :)

Woops, I literally thought this was a ask HN..!

Your all losers for down voting us. us = the people who wrote their editor

there we go.

vim.

it didn't ask what is your favourite text editor :)

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