What's your favorite editor to hack with? | Hacker News Reader

What's your favorite editor to hack with?

12 pointsmhidalgo63 comments

I love TextMate on the Mac. Personally I think it's the best thing since sliced bread :)

The only problem is that it's not cross platform and it's not available when you're connecting over SSH into a server to fix some problems. I use Vi most of the time to just edit configuration files, etc, but I found it lacks the power I need for doing serious hacking (for all the vi lovers out there, I'm willing to admit this is due to my ignorance).

I'm re-trying to learn Emacs to do some Erlang hacking but I've always been turned off the by the relatively cryptic key combinations.

Why regular Vi and not Vim?

You are right, I actually use Vim not Vi, I don't like Vi much as it doesn't seem to like certain things, like key movements in insert mode.

there are no movement commands in insert mode (to my knowledge) in vi

Print yourself an emacs cheatsheet, key combinations get a little cryptic but they are the fastest way to interact with an editor (I think its probably good to use them even in other editors)

This sheet's a little basic, but its a start: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/guides/package/emacs/emacs.html

Aquamacs is a pretty good crutch if you want to wean yourself off of standard keyboard shortcuts slowly. Basically, 'Cmd' + key does the Emacs thing most closely corresponding to the usual thing a Mac program would do. Cmd-O for Open, Cmd-X to cut, etc. This works because the main Emacs key combinations use Ctrl, of course.

Cure for cryptic key combinations:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki?CuaMode

Vi. The simplicity, speed, and the fact that it is installed on any *nix system by default are my favorite aspects of Vi. I've played around with Vim, but haven't migrated to it because I just don't use the features.

At times, I have been tempted to move to Emacs due to all its cool features but have not yet, maybe some day. Emacs in slime mode has been great to use while learning lisp.

Petsonally, I can't imagine being without "zz" to center my view. I don't know if Vi has an equivalent. "zb" and "zt" are nice, too.

I use Ctrl-U and Ctrl-D to reposition the screen with respect to the cursor, and it works out great.

I can see how what you describe 'zz' doing would be nice though.

Emacs (http://www.io.com/~jimm/emacs_tips.html).

Lately I've been using Komodo edit from ActiveState, for a few reasons: It's free (but not open source), cross-platform, optional vi (or emacs) key bindings, built-in FTP support, cool "toolbox" feature, code completion for a few scripting languages...

And it is based on the Mozilla platform, so it has extensions just like Mozilla products.

i'm a schizophrenic:

emacs - as a user, for lisp, xml, text, html templates, everything that takes time. Launched at morning.

vi/vim - as a root/admin, for editing config files, especially on remote machines

notepad.exe - on windows, very rarely

> i'm a schizophrenic

...your interface to reality is unreliable?

I'm basically the same, although I have viper and vimpulse modes switched on in emacs. (Years after switching from vim I still thought non-modal editing was an aberration, so I gave up trying to brainwash myself.)

And (very) occasionally I use ed to make small changes. That's mainly just to demonstrate my 1337ness to the one person who cares (me).

vim. if you're hacking rails in vim, make sure to check out the rails.vim plugin (http://rails.vim.tpope.net/). it rocks. also, for general-purpose web dev, use the matchit plugin (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=39) to balance your xml/html tags.

Clay tablets (in my lame attempt to be more hardcore than the 'vim and proud of it' club)

I've been using 'e' a bit. It's supposed to be the Textmate equivalent on Windows:

http://e-texteditor.com/

Intype is another editor that's trying to bring Textmate to Windows, but it's not as polished as 'e':

http://intype.info

Vim.

At work, it's Visual Studio 2005 + ViEmu + Visual Assist.

I generally use vim and have the ViAllOver input manager to add vi commands to other text editors.

http://www.dabble.org/viallover/

Unfortunately, ViAllOver won't work in Komodo, TextMate, etc. since many editors don't use NSTextView.

I was following intype from the beginning (because of the snippet functionality to tell you the truth) but while a usable version didn't came along i had to learn another one, so i went with emacs... if was love at 42th sight.

Notepad2 on Windows ( http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html ), the best replacement for Notepad.

vi on nix

I use vim and gvim.

vim, obviously.

Bah! Visual editors are so new-school.

You should use ex :)

Sam is the coolest of the non-visual editors, but it's deceptive because it comes with a graphical mode. If you run with that off, though, it's ed on steroids.

ex is the same executable as vim/vi these days.

are you sure this was meant to be in reply to me? :)

Depends what I'm hacking. I actually use both vi and emacs -- vi for quick edits and emacs for more serious work. Eclipse for Java but nothing else. I'll resort to ed if I'm on a system where I don't have my emacs customizations and vi isn't vim.

Vim

emacs

Visual Studio for C#, though I haven't used it in awhile. Also sometimes IDLE for Python and Dev-C++ for C. (Though for C I mostly use emacs now)

PluggableTextMorph

(g)Vim

Kate, mostly. Vim when I need to do a quick edit (I use xterms for a lot of stuff I do) or when logging in remotely.

emacs for general purpose and languages. Eclipse for Scala and Netbeans for Java. DrScheme for MzScheme.

Eclipse. Plenty of good plugins available for many languages, excellent SVN/CVS integration.

currently I'm learning Emacs, and I'm loving it. For quick tasks (i.e.: config file, glue scripts) if emacs is not running (i.e.: connected on a server) then Vim.

For really stupid things, cat ;)

Hmm, I've always found it odd how many people say they use emacs, but not for "quick" tasks. It's not like it takes long to start it up -- on my machine, emacs -f kill-emacs takes 0.12 seconds.

On one of my old machines, development server not my desktop:

  edu@galileo:~$ time emacs -f kill-emacs

  real    0m1.421s
  user    0m0.092s
  sys     0m0.052s

  edu@galileo:~$ time vim --cmd :q

  real    0m0.016s
  user    0m0.008s
  sys     0m0.004s

I have to add that if I run again emacs it loads pretty fast, but the first time it's slooow.

  edu@galileo:~$ time emacs -f kill-emacs

  real    0m0.136s
  user    0m0.068s
  sys     0m0.044s

And you don't even have to start up emacs at all. I keep mine running for months without exiting. You can use tramp mode for editing remote files if needed:

/[user@]machine:localfile

the same as my favorite editor for everything... vim

Nobody else likes using ed sometimes?

emacs

I learned it for Slime, and started using it for everything else when every other editor felt crippled.

vi - preferably elvis, because I'm a contrarian (and it comes as standard with Slackware)

NetBeans, ;)

irb/ghci/drscheme, and then just copy-pasting into something stupid like pico.

TextMate

I've started using e Text editor for Windows; as it supports the TextMate bundles.

Another vote for e. I love it, Snippets are the bomb, and the textmate bundle support is great as well.

the next step is to move to osx :)

textmate, bundles are great

SlickEdit

Smultron.

Intype.

vim

TextMate

stone & chizzle

Kate

Scite

eclipse

jedit

I prefer to use jEdit when I'm working on a project that I move between several different machines to work on - if I know I'll be developing on a mac, linux, and windows machine it's good to keep some sense of organization the same inside the text editor and it's plugins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com