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Poll: What text editors do you prefer?

65 points by duaneb ↗ HN
Inspired by the recent polls on which programming languages people like and dislike, I decided to put together a poll with the most popular editors and IDEs to figure out what text editors people prefer.

I think I got most of the popular editors, but if your favorite one isn't here, ask in the comments and I will add it.

38 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 85.8 ms ] thread
varunsaini
Sublime Text 2 for me. Very powerful and easy to use.
duaneb
Yea, that's what I use. I'm very pleased with it.
jiggy2011
What, no option for the original nodepad or what about DOS edit?
Achshar
Not that i use it but it really helped me in the beginning of my learning of html and php. Dreamweaver.
udp
GVim and MacVim. I'd probably use Sublime Text 2 if it supported vim modelines.
edanm
I've always wondered - what is so important about modelines? I use both vim and ST2, and I've heard lots of people talking about modelines, but never really grokked what they were used for. Can you give me an example?
DanHulton
Bah. Real men program with a personally-magnetised needle and a steady hand.
warfangle
Excuse me. But _real_ programmers use butterflies.
koenigdavidmj
It's back to Reddit for you two.
warfangle
Oh, come on now. A little bit of fun is no good? ;)

By the way, 'back to reddit' doesn't quite make sense with me... I've been here three times as long.

These polls pop up every week or three. The distribution is usually pretty much the same. The comment threads are usually the same. The inevitable vi/emacs war breaks out.

Might as well have some fun with the monotony.

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TeeWEE
It depends on the language. JavaScript in Sublime. PHP in Netbeans. Java in Eclipse. ObjectiveC in XCode.
functionform
Interesting, no Textpad?
robin_reala
Textpad wasn’t bad 8 or so years ago, but it’s unfit for purpose these days due to its inability to handle Unicode. You’ve actually got to be quite careful with it, as it’ll mangle text you load and save.
swah
I use Sublime Text, but I miss Emacs every day (you can't really extend ST2...)
evo_9
If you haven't tried Sublime Text 2 yet, give it a go. Once you get the hang of installing packages and customizing it, you'll be hooked. It's a pretty incredible package.
simonsarris
I am taken by surprise that I am the only one so far it seems, in this topic and the one from nine days ago, that uses Programmer's Notepad.

http://www.pnotepad.org/

I always figured it was fairly popular. Many compare it to Notepad++, which has many points here but I have never used.

Therefore I will check out Notepad++, though I urge Notepad++ users to check out Programmer's Notepad!

axusgrad
I was wondering if that was a re-incarnation of "Programmer's File Editor" (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/) which I used years ago. After that stopped updating, I switched to Context (http://www.contexteditor.org/), which also stopped updating and will probably stay that way until it's re-written. Context is still my favorite, but has problems in Windows 7, and Notepad++ is almost as good without the problems.
martinp
Somewhat language dependent. IntelliJ IDEA for Java stuff. Vim for everything else.
binarymax
My two: Bluefish(on Ubuntu) and Textpad(on Windows) never seem to show up on these lists.
aantix
No Rubymine? Hands down the best Ruby/Rails IDE out there.
useful
Notepad++ is awesome. I'm just sick of getting corrupt settings. My only gripe is the plugins could have better shortcut/toolbar integration
doubleconfess
Wow, SublimeText has overtaken Textmate in Hacker News usage. I'm amazed by this.

I'm somebody that switched by the way, but I thought I was in the overwhelming minority.

raullen
really depends on what OS you prefer... For MacOS, Sublime Text is the best one per my understanding.