Poll: What Text Editor Do You Use? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What Text Editor Do You Use?

42 pointsmkrecny69 comments

I like Emacs. Enough to vote for both Emacs options :P.

With something like Evil, you can get most of the benefits of Vim combined with all the power of Emacs. I'm not a user myself, but it sounds awesome--I'm considering learning Vim commands just to take advantage of it.

The only downside is the learning curve. And I think there is a philosophical point to make here: for a tool you'll be using as much as your text editor, the learning curve should not really matter. Even if it takes you a while to get used to Emacs/Vim, the productivity benefit will more than pay for itself. I think optimizing for a shallow learning curve is simply focusing on the wrong thing and actively counter-productive.

If that's your only take-away from all this, I'll be content.

Emacs-Vim combinations are a lot of fun. I used Emacs+Viper (or VILE or evil or something-can't really remember) along with SLIME when learning lisp, and it was definitely the best of both worlds. The Vim philosophy of separating editing and typing works really well with code-as-data philosophy of lisp, and Paredit + a built-in REPL made changes and feedback nearly instant. Playing with the editor was almost as fun as actually writing programs!

Bit afraid of emacs, but now that i began learning LISP with gcl , i might look into it. Is it harder than VIM ?

Oh no, certainly easier than Vim. But the important point is that how difficult something is should not stop you from learning it: what matters is how much benefit you can get from it. And you can certainly get a lot of benefit from Emacs!

The confusion here, of course, is that text editor implies something. IntelliJ, for example, is not a text editor, and I do not use it as such.

The question implies (though, luckily, the answers are not limited) that you use just one text editor. Quite the opposite in fact, I feel if you are just using one tool for the job (always in vim, for example), you are unnecessarily limiting yourself to your tool set.

When all you have is a hammer, and all that jazz.

Edit: I should note that I'm just being whiny this morning. I should go back to playing with code.

I'm wondering why BBEdit is missing in this poll? It's one of the best Mac text editors. Rock solid with a great support and tons of powerful features right out of the box.

Some users like apps that just work - you don't need to waist hours to customize, add plugins, tweak and turn.

BBEdit++

BBEdit +1 from me too.

I abandoned BBEdit for Textmate around 2006 I think. I went back to BBEdit when Textmate looked like it was a dead-end (2011 ish?).

Three things that drew me (back) to BBEdit:

  1. Most of the features from TextMate I used made it to BBEdit (Cmd-T, packages)
  2. BBEdit has been around for 20 years... I really don't want to pick up, learn, and spend years investing in a flash in the pan editor.
  3. I *really* don't want to fiddle with lisp to configure my editor

There are still some features in TextMate I miss. For example, TM's language grammers are still lightyears ahead of BBEdit's, and having written half a dozen grammers for each platform I know of which I speak. But BBEdit is solid and pretty great.

Also, shell worksheets are pretty amazing.

Disclosure: I run @bbedit_hints on Twitter.

Emacs is mentioned twice in the list of options.

M-x uniquify-all-lines-buffer ;)

Emacs is so good, it's listed twice to dilute the votes and give other editors a chance.

As an emacs user I voted for both and I'm pretty sure most emacs users did the same. This doesn't really dilute it but gives the impression that emacs is more popular (that and we yell louder).

Notepad++, Eclipse, Vim depending on what I'm doing.

Eclipse when frequently moving between many files in a project, quickly opening project files via CTRL-SHIFT-R, and to benefit from configured project stuff like file synchronization or some plugins e.g. for legacy VCS that we partially use and I don't want to waste time to learn.

Notepad++ mostly when performing some find & replace operations and opening files that are not imported into Eclipse.

Occasionally Vim when I want to do sth quickly without leaving the console, like minor editing, Git commit messages etc.

Vim.

I use Notepad++ when I have someone looking over my shoulder, as most people in my group don't spend their day in a text editor and never have. Those people have Notepad++.

Why no Visual Studio? I personally don't use it but all our machines at work have it installed.

Good results here from a year ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717754

EditPlus---although at some point I will have built in to Sublime all of the features that I like. That said I'll probably always use it. Face it since I use notepad, It's unlikely that I'll abandon any editor that fits a need. I particularly like Emacs ability to write a task oriented package as a kind of drop in edit/language. Hell, I use editors like I use languages---use the right one for the task at hand.

Another editplus user here.

Sublime Text for code, Mou for editing Markdown, iA Writer when I need to write long form blog posts. I also occasionally use Google Docs & Pages when I need to edit documents for college.

Mou, to the best of my knowledge, provides the best real-time live preview of Markdown code. iA Writer really helps when you need to focus (had tried Byword previously but didn't impress me -- maybe I'll give it a try again.) And, well, what can one say about Sublime? Love it.

I use 3+epsilon different editors depending on the situation.

I use Sublime when I'm on a Mac; vim when I'm ssh'd to a remote system and just need to quickly edit a file, or even sometimes locally if I just need to add one or two lines. Emacs if I'm on a remote or non-Mac system and need to do more in-depth editing.

What I really love is just "cat" to a file, though.

Chrome Dev Tools might be my answer next year. If you haven't seen the fantastic work Paval has been doing to allow you to write your app without leaving the browser, check out this talk from Thursday:

https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/325206725

OP: Please add LightTable if possible. I don't use it, but I am curious about its trajectory.

And Visual Studio.

I was recommended Text Wrangler and I've been using that while on Mac.

Missing in the list: Geany

Does IntelliJ and Eclipse really qualify as text editor here? I'd say i'm using a mixture of vim (server side work), Sublime Text (quick text editing) and IntelliJ/PyCharm (coding).

Geany (mssing) and PyCharm (I will vote that as ~IntelliJ)

Kate. I just need the syntax coloring and the terminal.

This again?

BBEdit

Acme

I'm a big fan of the Unix/Plan9 philosophy and I write C and Go... but I really can't get over Acme, using the mouse is so unproductive for me.

Plus I need some syntax highligting.

Using the mouse or keyboard is a rounding error compared to the time and errors I save by keeping the commands I use in per-directory guide files. I type out a command once, then later modify it slightly repeatedly to suit new needs, and highlight it and run it.

I've never found navigating to and selecting text with keyboard commands as fast and forthright and mindless as just moving the mouse and clicking to locate the cursor and select a range of text, and I used Emacs for 11 years. Also, since Acme binds common operations like cut, paste, and execute to mouse chords, I don't leave the mouse to do these things.

I don't dig candy-colored text, so the lack of syntax highlighting is a plus for me.

Curious: Are you using AcmeSAC, native plan9, 9vx or hosted inferno or the Plan 9 from Userspace?

For a few years I used each of Wily on a Sun box, then Acme SAC on Windows, and now hosted Inferno on Linux. I could use acme from plan9port, but I prefer Inferno because the whole environment gives me other nifty OS stuff like Inferno's shell sh and /env, which I make use of for the build tool I'm writing. The trickiest part of using Inferno is dealing with the different paths to files depending on whether you're running under emu (emu uses /n/local for files under host /, and / for files under host's /usr/inferno), or on the host (host uses / for files under emu's /n/local, and /usr/inferno for files under emu's /).

VIiiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmmmmmmmm

thunder and lightening clashes

There are two Emacs entries at the moment.

That's because recent versions of Emacs don't fit into one poll option anymore. :-)

Lighttable is already very pleasant to use. It's light on features but it's new and it's coming along nicely.

MacVim, vi, Emacs (though by far the least often), Texmate 2, Sublime Text 2 (as much as Emacs), Mou...

I don't see RubyMine on here so I voted for IntelliJ.

SublimeText is my fallback and vi is fallback^2.

I'm not an Emacs user. I assume Emacs can open a 4GB file in less than a second?

Depends on the machine. With https://github.com/m00natic/vlfi you can explore arbitrarily large file in instant.

Sublime Text 2 + plugins for frontend projects (HTML/CSS/JS)

Netbeans for backend projects (PHP)

ed is missing.

And, yes, I used that thing over telnet in this century to do coding for a MUD…

Ed is the standard text editor.

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Do you mean that it isn’t necessary to list it here because everybody uses it all the time and listing it would render the poll senseless?

There's two emacs options!

Kate and KWrite

Missing in the list: Chocolat

Yeah, I noticed. +1 for Chocolat

Vim since the past 10 years.

when i'm on windows, notepad++ and sublime text, when i'm on linux, gedit.

BBEdit

nano

BBedit

EditPlus

TextWrangler

Xcode mostly

SublimeText

Visual Studio

SQL Server Management Studio

MS Word

Far Manager

Outlook

Google Docs

Light table!

EditPlus

SimpleEdit

Evernote

LyX:)

SlickEdit

geany when on ubuntu

winvi32

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