Ask HN: Why do you love your text editor?
Or IDE? What features do you rely on the most? Less than obvious answers would be great. What I'm wondering is what the next great editor/IDE needs to do well in order to succeed.
I'm used to it (20+ years including vi).
Finger memory. Sometimes I don't know how I do things, they just get done when I think about it. When I show someone something in Vim I sometimes have to slow down and show myself first.
There's always something new to learn. That keeps it fun.
Emacs and Vim can do the same things, differently. Long use is what makes a good editor, or IDE.
I can browse a projects git history, and follow bugzilla links, for example (it's even possible to set things up so that different projects will lead to different bug trackers). I can also easily poke around in said history. I can find functions defined in a whole other area of the projects by using etags. I have an integrated debugger, which shows everything I need, and more. I have an email client with a ton of goodies (gnus threading is awesome, so is scoring and a lot of other things).
And I could continue virtually forever, but in the end, the reason I like Emacs is that it provides a familiar and integrated environment for every single task I can think of, and it lets me extend and enhance it at my heart's content.
From the time I wrote my first Linux config file, to when I started coding in C (and through the next dozen languages I learned), from using RCS to CVS to SVN to git and hg, when I was a security geek, a nuts-and-bolts coder, a web developer, and a typesetter... I stuck with emacs.
I know folks who learned only a fraction of that breadth of computing tasks, yet passed through six or seven editing environments, revision control front-ends, and so on doing it. There was this extra thing they had to do -- audition appropriate IDEs and customize on to their liking -- every time they learned something new. I'm confident I can pick up whatever language I like without that overhead.
For me, vi + git + make works well. Have tried most IDEs and keep coming back to this combination. Use a second screen to refer to APIs etc.
Things I like about them - they are fast - to load up and fast to do search/replace on large files.
- in the case of Gedit it works with the filesystem which works with FTP so I could do a quick edit on-line just by logging in and right-clicking a file - very convenient.
- Syntax Highlighting
- In the case of Kate also auto indent and in Quanta the autocomplete and highlighting open/close parenthesis, brace, bracket pairs.
What I would like to see is some editor that helps flag non-ISO-8859 characters.