Ask HN: What code-editor do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What code-editor do you use?

12 pointspranaya_co41 comments

I have been using Coda for a while and like it but it has its limitations. Just curious what editor is popular among coders today.

Extra credit if you also tell me your favorite language.

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I used Vim for a really long time, but then got a job at a company that uses Emacs + Slime really saw the light.

Emacs is an amazing program, but really is awful without EVIL/Paredit. I don't really like the commands chaining and actually find it hurts my wrists after a day in Emacs mode. If anyone has any advice on how to maximize emacs I would love to hear them!

Please don't ignore wrist pain. If your behavior doesn't change the pain will not get better and can get much worse.

When I used a traditional keyboard layout. I bound the key immediately to the left and right of space as control. Similar to the space-cadet keyboard: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Space-cad...

This allows you to use the relatively strong thumbs to activate the commonly used ctrl key. I now use a Kinesis advantage pro which similarly allows the thumbs to activate many commonly used keys.

Emacs.

Tried it years ago and absolutely hated it, then last year I saw a screenshot of someone's org-mode setup and thought I'd give it another go. Since then it's become my main editor for coding, project organization, diet tracking and more.

I used Emacs for 11 years, but gave it up in 2004 for wily/acme-sac/acme. Now I use Acme (running in hosted Inferno) to edit all text files, mostly shell scripts and notes. My favorite shell dialect is Inferno's sh. My favorite text stream editor is sed (because I can use it in scripts), followed by the sam-like Edit command in Acme.

I have many favorite languages for different tasks, because I don't try to make one language do everything, and it takes less time and effort to make a language do things for which it was designed.

My favorite functional language is Haskell, my favorite systems language is Go (I should do more Limbo programming in Inferno), and my favorite object-oriented language is Ruby.

My favorite production-dependency-management language is my own build tool credo, followed by Plan 9's mk.

My favorite document language is UTF-8, followed by LaTeX if I actually have to make it look pretty.

I'm not ashamed to admit I spend most of my coding time with Notepad++ — I suppose I'm not a "real" programmer. I think I'll most likely switch to Sublime Text eventually though, if nothing else because of its cross OS compatibility; I just have to find some time to test if everything I use on npp is there on Sublime Text aswell.

Why the shame Notepadd++ is awesome. Sublime is just the same.

I don't know, folks here tend to think you have no idea what you are doing if you don't use vim or emacs.

I made the switch from Notepad++ to Sublime Text recently. Sublime Text feels quite a bit more polished and was easier to get it setup to fit my needs. Definitely recommend giving it a try.

Out of curiosity: is there anything you miss from npp? Any critical feature that isn't there in Sublime Text?

Sorry for the late response. I cant recall anything that I missed from NotePad++. Once I was all set up in ST2 (which was super quick thanks to the package installer), everything felt the similar.

I mostly do ASP.NET MVC development, so I use Visual Studio 2010 + 2012 with a bunch of plugins daily. I also bought a bunch of other IDE's on JetBrains' end of of the world sale including Intellij Idea, WebStorm, RubyMine and PyCharm. I have found they are a lot slower than VS 2012. I haven't worked with Eclipse/Netbeans in over a year. Other than that I usually use Notepad++ daily and I really like SublimeText - I've used it on trial, but haven't bought a license yet. I also use Microsoft Management Studio for T-SQL, otherwise one of the aforementioned text editors. A couple of months ago I was hacking away on Ubuntu and found Geany - which is actually pretty good for what you pay for (free). CodeBlocks on windows is not bad either. It might be a good idea to specify language of choice with preferred IDE if that's what you're after :)

"I also bought a bunch of other IDE's on JetBrains' end of of the world sale including Intellij Idea, WebStorm, RubyMine and PyCharm"...RubyMine and PyCharm are IntelliJ plugins, check them out before dropping $$ on the license upgrade.

Will do, thanks.

I'm using Aptana, a PHP centric variation of Eclipse.

It's great at matching parenthesis, braces and brckets, provides popup tips on commands and functions (including defined) as you code, can customize syntax highlighting, does some proactive error checking and the file manager is good. Doesn't do upload well.

Used to use Quanta Plus - what I miss from that was the better speed, drag and drop tags (drop an image from your tree into your source - instant img tag.) Better PHP example popups, easier color tag editing, nice preview/WYSIWYG editor pane and decent printout (aptana printing is formatted lousy, and sublime is literally non-existent) And better file transport (pre KDE 4)

IntelliJ, for almost everything...best $50 I ever spent. Seriously, Java, PHP and even my first Rails project. Missing my favorite MVC framework(CI) for PHP though.

Wait for the sale.

Are you anticipating a sale soon? I've been eyeing IntelliJ IDEA for a while, but only expect to use it for hobby projects so I'm having a problem justifying the full cost. I do need some of the features in the Ultimate edition to make it worthwhile, too.

Unfortunately I can't gauge that at all. They don't pre-announce, I got my license of IntelliJ last December...I discovered the news here. I think they have a twitter acct which you can subscribe to, and they mention sales on that.

Try using Sublime Text. It has really grown with time and the new 3.0 version has a lot of awesome features.. http://www.sublimetext.com/

The best part about sublime text are the small add ons. Also, if you know Python, you can write your own add ons right in the editor console itself.

Favourite Language: C but by profession am a web developer so I mostly deal with JS, CSS3, PHP etc.

I just converted to Sublime Text 2, using the "Vintage Mode" VI keybindings. I'm still missing a few things, but the "Vintage Ex" package and a handful of custom key overrides have gotten me pretty close to an ideal VI environment. Sublime Text is extremely customizable.

My favorite language is C, but I'm doing mainly web front-end work now.

Emacs for everything. I am yet to find a more efficient editor. I guess the same can be be said if you're a seasoned Vim user.

I used Sublime a little recently for some HTML and CSS. It may be a better choice for some HTML and CSS, in some or most cases.

Favourite languages: Used to be C but now Ruby, as paradoxical as that sounds.

Textwrangler and vim. I'm looking to move to sublime eventually, but my needs aren't overly complex and I'd rather not spend the effort switching at the moment.

I waste maybe 1-5% of my time on inefficiencies regarding my editor. It's a low priority decision to me.

C#: Visual Studio 2012, obviously. Java: Eclipse Everything else: Sublime Text 2. Super powerful, customisable, a lot of packages, relatively quick learning curve. What's not to like!

Favourite language...either Javascript or C# at the moment. Not even kidding.

Vim exclusively for HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and learning Python.

Eclipse + Flash Builder for the occasional AS3.

Eclipse for toying with Android dev.

I went Dreamweaver 3 -> BBEdit -> TextMate -> Vim. I. Can't. Look. Back.

PyCharm and WebStorm for python and javascript/coffeescript respectively, matlab IDE for matlab, Visual Studio for the one C++ library i sometimes have to touch, Sublime text for just about everything else.

I use Sublime Text 2 with Vim bindings (Vintage mode) enabled. I use this at work to write PHP and Go. My favorite language is Golang.

I also routinely use Vim on the server and my local machine.

Java, C++ : eclipse

python, javascript, LaTeX : Geany in linux, notepad++ in windows.

I also use gedit to quickly edit files sometimes, but Geany has a lot of extra IDE like stuff.

I use vim, TextMate, gedit, Visual Studio, or Eclipse depending on the operating system and language I'm working with.

My favorite language is C#.

Vim in the terminal (along with tmux). Been using vim since about 1980. Favorite language currently is ruby, earlier it was C.

Netbeans for all java , javascript and J2EE. I had tried EMACS for Clojure but switched to Eclipse with CCW.

I've been using Eclipse, Aptana, RubyMine, Espresso, TextWrangler, Notepad++

Now I only use: Vim + Sublime

I've spent years with vim but recently started making the migration to Sublime Text

On Mac OS: TextWrangler, Xcode, Eclipse On Windows: Notepad++, Eclipse

Gedit. Surprisingly good with the right plugins.

NetBeans for JavaScript, Eclipse for Java

IntelliJ IDEA and Sublime Text

Sublime Text 2

Python

PyCharm, so Phyton :)

vim for coding and eclipse for refactoring

vi,vim,gedit

espresso

MacVim, TextWrangler, Xcode on Mac at home.

N++, IntelliJ and Eclipse on Windows and gedit, gvim on Linux at office.

Favourite language: Python (which I am learning). BTW I work with Java and C/C++(little) on Android platform.

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