Ask HN: Which text editor do you use for writing code?

7 points by startupflix ↗ HN

37 comments

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Preferably vim but sometimes Geany, and maybe notepad++ in a pinch.
vim and some plugins. sublime when I have like 10+ files to look at.
Visual Studio. By far best editor, JetBrains just copied the Visual Studio concept, and they still rocks on any non-visual-studio supported (by plugins or by default) programming language.
GNU Emacs for more than 15 years now!
Sublime when I can and Visual Studio for the gross Windoes stuff.
Notepad++ and Visual Studio 2013
Sublime with loads of plugins
Neovim w/ a custom config setup by a good hacker buddy of mine and a whole buncha plugins.
Sublime for one-off scripts, IntelliJ for big projects.
Well, this thread should be totally safe from flame wars!

I use (n)vim as my editor everything: making to-do lists (which I maintain in plain .txt files), writing TeX for school, and writing code.

Sublime for single file scripts, VS Code for projects.
nano and geany

(neo)vi(m) if I have to.

echo,sed,cat in a pinch ;) (but really love a well configured nano and geany is really great as well)

IntelliJ for projects. It’s not free, but the functionality will save you tons of time.

VS Code for misc files. It starts up way faster than IntelliJ when you need to do something quickly.

Vim on the server. For the record, I also use vim keybinding plugins for IntelliJ and VS Code.

I actually use a text editor that grew out of PE from the BeOS days. I just keep adding more and more features that I need.

When I don't have time to write my own features I use Sublime Text, BBEdit and Atom (for Markdown and docs)

pepper?
You win a prize.
So, IIRC, long ago you bought it from Hekkelman Programmatuur...? Has anything happened with it since or is it essentially your personal editor (PE, if you will)?

(Edit: I was a pepper user long ago and wondered whatever happened... there's not much trace of it on the web anymore.)

I was selling Pepper for a long while but I had a hard time keeping everyone happy and building for all platforms. So I got frustrated and stopped. Now-a-days, I actually have this all automated, it's a lot less work. I use virtual machines to checkout changed code and go through the build process, Unit test, package up, etc. They run all the time on a Mac Pro with 64gb RAM using VMWare Fusion.

I continue to enhance it. It's quite different. I have taken inspiration from KDevelop and QT Creator. I feel like it competes with any other editor our there. Dare I say Vi and Emacs too. I actually have a special interface for those users so they feel at home. A nice worksheet, built in shell, I wrote plugins for build systems like CMake, make, gcc, and also of course Git support. I wrote an iOS version that lets you use your Apple Pencil to hand write code, use it to edit existing code, save and commit back. I take your handwriting and convert it to proper letters/symbols/numbers , automatically.

Whew. I can list out more things if you want :-)

Thank you for being a Pepper user, BTW. I hope that you found it enjoyable while it was available. The old Windows, Linux and FreeBSD builds still work :-)

Linux desktop: kdevelop, kate

Remote ssh: vim

Windows: Visual Studio, Notepad++

It really depends on the language, doesn't it? Funny that nobody mentioned Eclipse or Netbeans here, it was so standard 10 years ago for Java.

I mainly work with C++, Fortran, Python, in classical HPC/data science based work where I don't really make use of an IDE.

vim for most one-offs, JetBrains IDEs for projects. I occasionally take the tour through emacs/spacemacs, Sublime, and VS Code to see what's new, but historically have come back to those two choices.