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Comment by mattowen_uk | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'd totally forgotten about PSPad... it used to be my editor of choice back in the XP days. These days I use Notepad++ (doesn't everyone on Windows?).

I think PSPad could benefit from new screenshots on its website, even though it's clearly still being actively updated, the screenshots make it look like it stagnated 10 years ago.

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> These days I use Notepad++ (doesn't everyone on Windows?)

In terms of souped up text editor, the exact transition that "everyone" made since:

Notepad++ > Sublime Text > Atom > VSCode

If by "everyone" you mean "developers when doing development work".

I work in a Windows shop these days, and I see Notepad++ used by everyone - developers and managers alike - for poking around various configuration and log files.

For small edits, look at logs, scratchpad, open JSON or XML files Notepad++ > UltraEdit > Sublime Text

For FrontEnd development Atom is nice but bloated > VSCode (arguably > Vim)

For Java development Eclipse (or variants like RAD, STS) > IntelliJ Idea

for other languages your mileage may vary...

You're not wrong; my only regret there is Atom, which never got the performance right when I used it.

VS Code is not great in performance compared to ST either, but it does more and it's got a much bigger ecosystem and developer activities.

ST feels more like a black box, irregular updates, vague provenance, etc. It works, and it worked really well for me back when (in the days when Javascript didn't have proper modules, documentation or types, think early days of NodeJS / NPM, Bower, BackboneJS, etc). But nowadays I'm not sure if it's keeping up with VS Code or IDE's. I'm mainly using intellij at the moment, but it's slow in its critical path - editing code (the main reason from moving away from it in the first place). An editor should NEVER lag or block when the user is typing. ST did this Right. Notepad++ probably does as well.

Sublime is still the most performant text editor I use. Its plugin ecosystem is not particularly healthy, but LSP helps bridge the gap with more advanced code editing tools. I mostly use it for quick edits, configuration files, etc. Sometimes I just want a break from Neovim I guess.

I don't regret buying Sublime at all, but I do feel like some potential was wasted there.

For me, ST is still the only editor in the world that works with really, really large files.

Same here, it's my go-to editor for anything over a few MB in size, frankly.

I went from Metapad > e - Text Editor > Sublime Text. Did anyone else use e? I still haven't seen another text editor that handled the undo buffer as well. The buffer had branching and a gui to view the edits and switch branches.

It also saved your undo buffer on close so you could still undo next time you opened a file.

Sublime is what I moved from Notepad++ from. It has good extensions and is very fast.

These days I use Visual Studio Code. It's separate to Visual Studio. Code is open source and runs on Linux and OSX as well.

There's a ton of extensions and it's super flexible.

Technically vscscode isn't open source completely, it has many proprietary features.

Which features are closed source? I thought the only difference the source on GitHub and the binary you download from Microsoft was branding and configuration.

Some of the extensions .. C# Debugger, Remote Server on WSL, SSH, Docker, whatever, Liveshare

The modern magic stuff. but the core editor is like you described.

Oh, and the market place itself.

Apparently the official C++ extension is not licensed to run in Codium either...although technically it seems to work in Codium just fine. Don't ask how I know. ;)

Also C++ language server, Python language server...

Which is kind of annoying to me, because the whole value proposition of VS Code to me is that it drives language sever development, which lets me use Emacs instead of VS Code :).

Fortunately, Clang can cross-compile for Windows while pretending to be MSVC, so I figured out how to make clangd work with MSVC-specific codebases, and I'm good for now.

I think they are factoring some core capabilities of Visual studio into language servers and vscode gets a subset. Do they are protecting big VisualStudio.

For a version of VSCode without the telemetry you can use VSCodium

ST4 is about to be released. The LSP plugin in ST4 brings it to the level of VSCode.

I find this good news, mainly, i hate electron apps. ST4 speed is legendary.

> These days I use Notepad++ (doesn't everyone on Windows?).

I did 10 years ago, but I'm now using vscode (with a stint of sublime in the meantime!)

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