Poll: Which is your primary text editor? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Which is your primary text editor?

115 pointsvishal0123153 comments

I find it interesting how much TextMate has declined. A few years ago, I believe it would have been the #1 response on this list. TextMate 2 these days, in the hands of the community, is truly excellent. The UI and UX has improved tremendously, and it is now free and open source. I imagine it is just too late. Everybody has moved on.

That said, I'm a switcher, too. I got fed up with the vaporware situation and moved to vim full-time a few years ago. I couldn't move back now.

Sublime Text 2 is kind of the spiritual successor to TextMate.

And Sublime Text 3 the successor of Sublime Text 2.

And $70 is a successor of 50

I could imagine you have more expensive tools at home that you use less often than a text editor.

Perhaps, but none of them had free alternatives that are equally capable.

s/equally/more/

Successor? It's the same program!

Given that Sublime Text does not look like a Mac app, and that TextMate was a Mac only app that looked very much like a Mac app, I find it to not be 'spiritual successor' in any shape or form. Sublime Text 2 is a cross-platform application. Having said that, Sublime Text has borrowed some good ideas from TextMate, but many editors do that these days.

I totally agree here. Sublime is just an rebound. People will move on. I think they should converge to Old Editors like Vim/Emacs because Editors like these don't die, they never have. They keep coming back, like a Zombie (Not the best example I could come up with).

But being on Emacs gave me an advantage of persistence. In past I have changed companies, development machines, operating systems and programming languages but never editor. It was always there, available.

s/Zombie/Phoenix/

Whenever I stumble into a "best editor" discussion, I am reminded of the words of Kieran Healy that adorn the top of my init.el (from http://kieran.healy.usesthis.com/):

``But even if TextMate 2 drops from the sky fully-formed and marveled at by all, Emacs will still be there, waiting. It will be there when the icecaps melt and the cities drown, when humanity destroys itself in fire and zombies, when the roaches finally achieve sentience, take over, and begin using computers themselves - at which point its various Ctrl-Meta key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe’s Intelligent Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God.''

And just like the platypus, vi/vim will still be there as the counter-example to intelligent design.

Asked yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728866

And with Vim in it.

...and with emacs listed twice.

sigh

OK, new rule: Nobody makes a poll about text editors anymore.

That probably didn't gain as much traction because half those items weren't text editors and he was missing a ton of IDEs to even make it a worthwhile poll in that regard. Plus Dreamweaver has no place in either such poll.

If you can still change the options, please change Vi to Vim, as I'm sure most of the people voting for it actually mean Vim.

Well, vi is the editor I use 2nd most (after Emacs), but I use nvi nearly as often as I use vim, and I avoid the vim extensions (except the useful :help).

I imagine changing vi to vim would be a bit like changing Emacs to GNU Emacs.

THere are people who don't use GNU Emacs?

I assume he's thinking of things like http://www.xemacs.org/

That and some other things. There were also several forks of GNU Emacs and Xemacs to support Mac OS Carbon/Cocoa, of which Aquamacs is still in widespread use.

There's also Steve Youngs' SXEmacs (a XEmacs fork), which is probably the most well-developed of several efforts to extend Emacs to be a window manager.

Are you really using Vi or the vi command "aliased" to Vim on most distributions?

vi defaults to vim on some of my machines, to nvi on others. I like to have access to both.

vim pros: syntax highlighting is often nice (though when I really care about highlighting, I usually use Emacs), vim's :help is very nice, vim is usually installed

nvi pros: the small TCB I prefer when I'm root (`find /usr/share/vim -name \*.vim | wc -l` just gave me 1103 results, including hundreds of scripts that might be run without me explicitly asking for them), no splash screen, avoids the autoindenting that is often irritating, bound to vi on FreeBSD

I can't say nvi vs. vim efficiency has been an issue for me, but it has been for some people ... http://www.galexander.org/vim_sucks.html

How could you have forgotten the standard text editor, http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

People often underestimate the power of ed. It's very useful when terminals are misbehaving and curses editors no longer work, or in shell scripts which modify files. (Ed commands in here documents.)

Ed anecdote: A friend of mine once wanted to make an inverted version of sed, which takes commands on stdin and applies them to a file named in the arguments. I think he called it fsed. I facepalmed and gave him my copy of The UNIX Programming Environment.

On more than one occasion I ended up editing files by piping them through sed because even ed didn't work (it tends to require writable /tmp or something like that)

Eclipse (not currently an option in the poll except as "other gui")

Similarly, I use Visual Studio for 99% of my text edits (ok, I work at a Microsoft-only company, and don't have much need for a text editor).

I do have Notepad++ installed, and if I had to say, I probably use Beyond Compare for my meager text editing needs.

If I switch to other software stacks, I'll probably use Sublime (although I'd like to keep on using an IDE).

Edit: I'm not the only one

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5736817

It is not a text editor.

Well, not quite sure about that.

The only time I edit a text file outside my IDE is when I connect directly to a server, and in that case I use vi.

That seems ridiculous to chose Vi as my primary text editor, when 99.9% of my text editing is done in Intellij.

Well I abstained in this case, however where do you draw the limit ? If there was a poll about "What is your primary IDE" would Vim or Emacs not be listed because they are "just text editor" ?

Vim/emacs are text editors and can be customized to act as IDE. IDEs are IDEs. If asked What is your primary IDE, you can still say emacs or VIM

Exactly! And when you use your IDE to edit text file they should be listed aswell using the same logic.

When I said 99.9% of my text editing is done in Intellij. I also meant text editing outside of the project I'm working on: various config files, log file parsing, remote config files, ... Except for some extreme case like very large file, I rarely find the need to switch to another editor those days.

Those days there is a large overlap between text editors and IDE. Both have made huge progress, so that outside java or c#, some text editor are perfectly serviceable IDE and conversely, IDE editor make decent editor.

Not sure of the converse part though. Anyway, I think we can continue arguing on semantics. This is not going to benefit anyone like the flame wars.

Use what you feel good and productive. Be happy.

Nothing stopping you using IDEs purely as a text editor if you want.

Although Eclipse makes a pretty good attempt at doing just that!

Eclipse 'merely' includes several text editors and is primarily used for editing text.

And in the same way that a car includes many control interfaces but is not itself a control interface, a program that contains text editors is not itself a text editor.

Well, Emacs isn't a text editor then.

Of course it isn't. Emacs is an OS, it just needs an inferior OS to bootstrap it

Vi != Vim

Yes, only nobody cares about and nobody uses vi anymore.

Even the "vi" mode in a lot of distros is vim with a compatibility flag. And people only use it in an unknown system to edit some admin files in a hurry.

Vi in 2013 == Vim.

Vi in 2003 == Vim.

Yeah, I see people get lost going VIM -> NVI all the time. Kinda wish NVI had some of the vim macro/etc functionality in it.

vi != nvi != Vim

Try using heirloom vi or Solaris vi sometime. Even nvi adds a lot of convenience.

No doubt, I have definately gone there, its a lil more of a PITA :)

Deleted comment

Most of the features Vim is used for don't exist in vi. Vi doesn't have visual mode, syntax highlighting, multiple level undo etc.

Also, Vim is 20+ years old as well.

Edit: grammar

The irony of calling somebody out on a false statement with a false statement of your own...

Vim is more or less a superset of vi. Even still, there are some subtle behaviors in real vi that do not work the same in Vim, even in Vim's "compatible" mode.

Of all the vi-like editors, Nvi is much closer to real vi than Vim is.

What? That's not true at all, though I don't know about the "more advanced" functions, since I quit vi and start using vim as soon as I can - because even things like insert mode completely differ.

I can see how technically, you can consider them the same. But anyone who's used to vim will have quite a bad time in vi because of all the things that don't work.

"Most of vim is from vi" doesn't mean it is same. For Vi != Vim to be wrong (or Vi == Vim to be true) everything that Vim provides MUST work with vi as well - only then they are same/equal.

BBEdit.

Odd that TextWrangler is on there but not BBEdit. Maybe could be grouped together like vi/vim.

Primary: Visual Studio (for C++)

Notepad replacement: Notepad++

Prolog, Haskell: Sublime Text (thanks to it, I can get rid of emacs completely)

Why do you want to get rid of Emacs?

Well, I didn't like it. Never felt productive in it. It felt very awkward. The only reason I was using it was the support of non-mainstream languages.

Even when I was full-time in Linux, my go to IDE was KDevelop. And mcedit for simple text editing.

> primary text editor

> Visual Studio

While my most often used local editor is emacs by far (and zile remotely), I also tend to use Visual Studio as simple text editor on windows. Some kind of Visual Studio shell is installed on almost any windows machine I need to use (be it Visual Studio proper, AvrStudio or something like that) and in contrast to notepad it does not have problem with LF newlines.

Visual Studio for coding, Microsoft Word 2013 for texts.

Do you not find MS Word a little overkill for working with plain text? Surely at the very least you'd want something that defaulted to monospaced fonts and didn't add formatting to your selections.

Visual Studio works better than Word for plain text, but I rarely deal with text anyways, its always some kind of code. The only thing I don't use Visual Studio for is LaTeX, where TeXnicCenter works better.

Okay. I admit to being surprised by this. Despite being a Sublime user myself I had expected vi[m]/emacs to handily beat all other options.

I'm sure there's a bit of selection bias by only polling the HN crowd (and at midnight on the west coast of the US / 3AM on the east coast -- a good portion of HN'ers are in SV).

The geographical interpretation is strange. Why would you think Sublime would be relatively more prevalent than vi/emacs in SV?

(Also don't forget it's coffee time in Europe)

> The geographical interpretation is strange.

Logically, you'd be right that it wouldn't make much sense. However geographical trends like that do happen. eg SLES tends to have more traction in Europe than in the US (where RHEL is king of the enterprise space). Opera is more widely used in Europe and some eastern blocks than it is in the States. Apple hardware has a lower foothold in Europe than in America. And so on.

Often it's just a case that people will use what they see their peers use rather than what they're told they should use by the internet.

Sure they happen. But what is the basis for assuming so so matter-of-factly in this case? If you ask me I'd expect SV to have higher vim/emacs penetration since it's been tech central since before the invention of the terminal.

> Sure they happen. But what is the basis for assuming so so matter-of-factly in this case?

I can't help you there as I wasn't the one that made that comment.

> If you ask me I'd expect SV to have higher vim/emacs penetration since it's been tech central since before the invention of the terminal.

You could make similar arguments against SV: vim was written by a European (Bram Moolenaar) and GNU emacs was widely popularised by a European OS (Linux). Sadly local statistical trends are rarely that simple to explain (and if we're honest, the results of these polls are anything but trustworthy to begin with)

> I can't help you there as I wasn't the one that made that comment.

But you're totally derailing my thread as that is the entire point of my comment. The OP presented it like some sort of foregone conclusion that SV would obviously skew to Sublime. Why!? I am not trying to make a claim that A) geographical variances don't exist or B) SV over-represents vim / emacs (that was merely a wild guess, not meant to state a position, just meant to demonstrate that intuitively the OP's argument makes no sense).

I hope that's clear now.

To be honest, I think you're being a tad argumentative. All the former poster said was the was "I'm sure that there's a bit of selection bias going on." Which is actually a very fair comment as polling at set times when only a specific region is active will generate some selection bias. He didn't state that it's a forgone conclusion that vi/emacs is unpopular in SV. If anything, he was just stating the obvious about how not everyone is on the same timezone and thus around to vote.

And accusing me of "totally derailing [your] thread" when it's neither your thread and nor am I going off topic, is rather childish. I appreciate you wanted pyre to expand on his comments, but let's not descend into hair-pulling just because someone else happens to side with a comment that you presumably misinterpreted (and I'm making that presumption because you latter agreed with his comment when I reworded it).

Would like to see some sort of breakdown for this based on something like traffic stats instead of a poll.

There was a poll yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728866, this reflects that.

PsPad ( http://www.pspad.com/en/ )

Macromates made a big mistake on delivering Textmate 2. First, it took ages. Second, it delivered a really slow editor compared with the speed of Sublime and third the communication with the community was almost inexistent.

Geany on Linux, JEdit on Windows. Line numbers, full paths, reasonable cursor behavior, color-coding for various languages, plugins, keybindings are mostly conventional and fully configurable, etc. - and both are GPL.

Geany here as well. Along with a Guake terminal it's extremely convenient for Python development and doesn't get in your way.

For Android I use Eclipse, but hopefully the new editor from Google will be an improvement.

Editors like joe and pico don't fit anywhere. They are neither CLI or GUI based. And no one in their right mind ever chooses to use a line-oriented editor as their primary editor. Even serial programmers don't do that.

Geany. We need something better than Syntax Highlighting. Something along the lines of the original Literate Programming. At least different fonts and styles for different syntax elements. Each package or multi-file module should have it's own background texture.

If you've got time and money to spare, and want to improve the editor you produce (not just use) then learn from the $300 SlickEdit editor. It does a lot of things right. And there's a go package for it.

VIM

VIM too here, since Vim wasn't on the list.

I don't have just one. Under Windows, I use a fork of Florian Ballmer's Notepad2 to replace Notepad. It's one of a number of editors based on Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control. It's small, starts fast, and can replace Windows Notepad through a registry hack. I also have Notepad++ and an assortment of other things installed.

Under Linux, I use Vim, emacs, and Geany, which is a lightweight IDE also based on Scintilla.

I've made this move recently myself, but I'm a little surprised how completely Sublime Text has hoovered up the TextMate constituency.

woo textpad! I haven't used it for years, but I did buy it at one point. I mostly used it for editing ActionScript 2, because the Flash CS4 editor just failed to do anything if you weren't using the latest and greatest language (you couldn't even configure spaces instead of tabs in the autocomplete ffs!) I was pretty hot on my textpad shortcuts and hacks. :)

Nower days I mostly work in Eclipse inside a Linux VM (convoluted, but I've found Eclipse in OS X to be severely deficient for python - and I can work on files on my host filesystem via a shared folder.)

When I need to edit in Mac OS I use Textmate 2, but I've never actually used any of the magic of Textmate beyond the syntax highlighting (and the latex compile-to-PDF key shortcut.)

jEdit. I'm surprised nobody seems to be using it considering how powerful it is. I have tried many editors over the years and SublimeText is the first one that comes close to it; but jEdit still has much better search functionality, especially in 'hypersearch' mode.

It's written in Java, and Swing to boot. People are unlikely to accept a slow, memory-hungry editor if it's not an IDE.

Totally love jEdit, especially the search functionality. I've been using it for more than 7 years now, though development of jEdit and plugins have slowed in recent years. I've tried using Sublime and Notepad++ but both of them don't feel right.

If jEdit were written in something other than Java, then it truly would have been an emacs successor. Unfortunately it's Java background is simultaneously both it's weakness and it's strength.

In this Context, Consider vi == vim

In this Context, consider Context a text editor: http://www.contexteditor.org/

Editplus - http://www.editplus.com/

+1 for Editplus. And all the others I use :)

I guess acme goes to "other gui"

...and to "other cli" just as well ;-)

I wouldn't have said so. Even ignoring the fact that it's a GUI app, it's also mouse driven. And the "CLI" aspect of Acme is really just a novel way of implementing shortcuts and macros, but since those functions are non-interactive, it's not really behaving like a command line.

At risk of nitpcking, I think the "other CLI" option should have read "other console based" (that is, unless they were expecting people to answer with the likes of sed hehe).

I don't understand what you mean with the CLI aspect of acme. Could you elaborate?

But re:"other cli" I agree: even ed counts as console-based, not CLI (which would be sed, cat, maybe awk and echo... not fun, but of course real programmers use butterflies)

With Acme, any piece of text can be executed as a command with a (IIRC) middle mouse button click.

So in one pane on Acme, you can have the following written down:

    ls ~/dev
    uptime

and middle clicking uptime or highlighting and then middle clicking ls ~/dev would literally run those commands and return the output in a new Acme pane (you can even go a step further and have commands inside comments in your source code - as it's all just text to Acme).

What's more, the File / Save menus are just a text pane that you can edit, delete and add text to. So Acme follows some of the paradigms of working with the command line in terms of the application being controlled by text rather than hotkeys and widgets. But essentially it's still a mouse-driven application.

Also, I up-voted you just for the subtly of the XKCD reference (usually people just drop the URL with much thought of adding their own wit to the conversation). Nicely done :)

Oh, I didn't think of middle clicking as "CLI" related in any way... I'm a relative newbie with respect to Acme, but I have recorded some videos in my blog (tagged Acme) about cool stuff you can do with it, and that I find beautiful in its own way. I love emacs (and in fact also vim, I use evil in emacs) but I find some of the ideas behind acme just too cool to overlook. You can drive acme completely, making it a gui to your text-based code (via the virtual file system /acme/events which pipes everything that goes on in the acme window!)

In Acme, middle click executes text under the cursor (and middle selection executes selection,) whereas right-click looks for text/opens file depending on what you point it to. You can also add extra arguments to commands (via the 1-2 chord, where you select something with the left button, select something else with the middle button and click the left button afterwards, so you can have ~/dev in your file pane, ls in another pane and execute ls ~/dev in one go without typing anything else.

Now I understand your comment. Just a side remark, ~ usually doesn't work correctly in Plan9 from User Space and you have to input all the path... I'm sure it can be worked around, but I haven't got time to figure it out.

Re: XKCD reference, I just love that comic. I even went as far as using it as the image in the "landing page" (or index, depending on how you think about it) in my personal page at the department I did my PhD... I'm still the only emacs user among ~30 hardcore unix users that have a preference for vi and vim (yes, both, I didn't forget the "m".) I can understand that they like vim (or I could if they knew more vim than they do, but they mostly don't and miss all the cool stuff vim has to offer, which is lots) but I just can't get why they don't even try emacs to see what other intelligent beings see in it. I have done it with vim, acme and I even try to use sam and ed occasionally to get used to different paradigms in editing. Probably I'm just nuts :)

> Now I understand your comment. Just a side remark, ~ usually doesn't work correctly in Plan9 from User Space and you have to input all the path... I'm sure it can be worked around, but I haven't got time to figure it out.

Sorry you're right. I was having a moment of absentmindedness there. The issue is Plan 9 doesn't use tilde as a shortcut for home[1] so I don't think there's anything you can do (short of editing the source code and aliasing it manually)

[1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/unix_to_plan_9_command...

> I'm still the only emacs user among ~30 hardcore unix users that have a preference for vi and vim (yes, both, I didn't forget the "m".) I can understand that they like vim (or I could if they knew more vim than they do, but they mostly don't and miss all the cool stuff vim has to offer, which is lots) but I just can't get why they don't even try emacs to see what other intelligent beings see in it. I have done it with vim, acme and I even try to use sam and ed occasionally to get used to different paradigms in editing. Probably I'm just nuts :)

People are busy and if you're already efficient in one editor then there's often little incentive to try another. I did give Acme a try though - used it pretty heavily for about a week then came to the conclusion that it was getting in the way more than it was speeding things up (eg it's become habit to use middle click to paste text). Plus most of my work is done inside SSH sessions, so I wasn't really making much use of the Acme's innovative features.

It's a bit of a pity because I do like the concept behind Acme and if it was customisable than I could probably tweak it to fit in better with my work flow. Maybe one day I'll give it another try, but for now it was more jarring than performance enhancing :(

I edited the source of p9ports to add ctrl-click to work as left-click (so I could chord while on my macbook without mouse.) It's a relatively plain codebase (I could find my way, so it should be easy... I'm very far from being able to navigate a lot of C code easily unless I have written it myself) but the tilde tweak would be just too much :(

I feel your acme-pain. In some sense it is wonderful, but in many others is just a pain. I still use it (just to get the feeling) for occasional small coding and for plain ol' writing: I just added wwb (the writer's workbench, a set of command line tools to analyse text) to my usual tag line and use it to test my writing for the blog and some lengthy emails and the link. It's handy for that (not that I couldn't do it in emacs)

I wonder how many of us are completely fluent in Vim and Emacs and still use ST2/3?

Scintilla embedded in our own Lua IDE; the same "engine" is used by Notepad++. I also regularly use SciTE, which is a small standalone Scintilla-based editor.

I also use SciTE. It's extremely lightweight and easy to use.

Would not have put Sublime in front of Vi/Vim but there we go, it is a truly excellent text editor despite the qualms about it not being programmable.

Are we gonna have one of these every other day now?

VIM FOREVER ......

don't know what to choose.

i'm making something like a transition from vim to sublime, so right now i use both equally.

but it seems to me that using vim on the server in a screen or tmux session is the right thing to do ( no need to leave into bash whatsoever ), while it's extremely pleasant to edit source files over sftp.

so i think i'll choose to use this combination ...

Since Textmate is ONLY available in Mac (not other OS) , that might the main reason why sublime2 succeed .

Not listed, but as a long time emacs user I have been (slowly) trying to make the switch to Adobe Brackets

For the pure editing of text, Vim is the clear winner. Whether that's all you want, is another question.

If only working with multiple files was easier... what are you guys using these days ?

[edit]

Also, one thing that shows how Vim is oriented towards opening and closing it all time is that preventing acidental quitting is quite hard to achieve (only with hacks..)

I've aliased vim -> "vim -p" which opens files into multiple tabs when passed as arguments.

I've rebound the arrow keys to switch and move tabs and buffers.

* up/down: previous/next buffer

* left/right: previous/next tab

* shift left/right: move tab to left or right

    inoremap <Up> <esc>:bprev<cr>
    inoremap <Down> <esc>:bnext<cr>
    inoremap <Left> <esc>:tabprev<cr>
    inoremap <Right> <esc>:tabnext<cr>
    noremap <Up> :bprev<cr>
    noremap <Down> :bnext<cr>
    noremap <Left> :tabprev<cr>
    noremap <Right> :tabnext<cr>
    nnoremap <silent> <S-Left> :execute 'silent! tabmove ' . (tabpagenr()-2)<CR>
    nnoremap <silent> <S-Right> :execute 'silent! tabmove ' . tabpagenr()<CR>

As for working with multiple files easier when vim's already open, it's a combination of Command-T, Buffer Explorer, and NERD tree.

The only vim plugin I use: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1664

With a few mappings:

    noremap <leader>b :ls<cr>:buffer 
    noremap <C-a> :b#<cr>
    noremap <C-h> :bprev<cr>
    noremap <C-l> :bnext<cr>

:bn [buffer next] :bp [buffer previous]

:bn is mapped to backslash on my installation.

:b <tab> for a list of all open files where you can pick the one you want to switch to. Mapped to ",." on my machine.

vim might have its problems. But buffer switching isn't one, for me.

How could anyone use :bn and :bp? Its 4 keypresses!! :) Contrast with ctrl-tab.

What do you call "accidental quitting"?

If you have two windows, :q closes the current window, and most people do that all the time, for removing buffers from the view. But if you only have one window and run that, with the intention of dumping the buffer or simply by mistake, your Vim is closed...

You misspelled "emacs".

I like both, but Vim's modal nature and the consequently far fewer control combinations make it much faster for editing text. On the other hand, emacs' language-specific modes and built-in repl-in-the-editor support is awesome.

Komodo Edit, and it's never listed.

Hard to beat ST at the moment. I'm guessing that it will eat Vi user as well in the future.

PSPad (http://www.pspad.com/en/)

I think everedit is a good replacement for sublimetext in windows. www.everedit.net

I'm going to assume a vi vote is a vim vote. -1 for vi if that is not the case.

Geany

UltraEdit.

No pico/nano love?

Just kidding, I've only used it in dire emergencies too.

Nano is my preference for a linux editor. It is simple, it stays out of my way, there's nothing to memorize, there's no Java, and the syntax highlighting is decent.

When I worked at Google, I did all my coding in a custom version of nano which I'd hacked up to show an 80-column marker.

SciTE - the Scintilla Text editor.

very lightweight yet super-flexible!

Tried all, sticked with SciTE + Scintillua (for more lexers).

Out of interesting (OS X Users) - Emacs or Aquamacs?

Emacs.

I consider Aquamacs's stated goal to be a worthy goal, but Aquamacs does not actually change Emacs's behavior to be more like an ordinary GUI app in situations I care about.

For example, in Emacs, if you use the pointing device to select an extent of text then hit the right (left) arrow key, the selection is increased in size by one character to the right (left). In contrast, the vast majority of GUI apps on Windows, OS X and Linux inactivate the selection leaving the insertion point at the right (left) edge of where the selection was (and you can get the behavior that Emacs uses by modifying the right-arrow key press with the shift key). Aquamacs chose the Emacs way of behaving here.

In summary, most of the choices Aquamacs made for when to do things the Emacs way and when to do them the standard GUI way differ from the choice I would have made.

P.S. In the situation examined above, the behavior of Acme (tested on plan9port on OS X) also differs from standard GUI behavior, but in a way different from how Emacs differs: Acme inactivates the selection, but then moves the insertion point one character to the right of the right edge of where the insertion point was, which makes some sort of internal logical sense (if the selection is considered to be a sort of insertion point that has temporarily stretched to be n characters wide) but is a poor design decision for Acme users that have to switch back and forth between Acme and other GUI apps.

Emacs. Aquamacs was just too weird. scratch wasn't in lisp-interaction mode, I had to change too many things to get normal behavior (opening multiple frames vs just buffers, etc.), and so on.

Actually， it is vim with customizied plugins.

Wow.... VI and Sublime are close.

PyCharm

I think we have a winner.

There no XCode. Oh no.

Isn't Geany missing?

Yes. And Geany is my choice as well. Pretty, good as a editor, with some features of an IDE I never use (but others I do use), and customizable enough.

Sublime Text

Codewright!

WriteMonkey

TextMate

I love vim

Xcode!

TextMate

Geany

Notepad++

Mou

Sublime :D , It's new-age VI.

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