Ask HN: what code text editor do you enjoy the most?

7 points by musiic703 ↗ HN

29 comments

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Sublime Text 2 for Mac and Notepad++ for Windows.
Visual Studio (Javascript, C#, C++, etc).

I use Notepad++ for PHP but it is fairly bad. Eclipse for Java (Android) which is also fairly bad.

Never understood the appeal of using a console application for text editing (yes, I can use Vi fine). It is like tying one hand behind your back and then claiming it makes you "more efficient" once you learn how to do everything one-handed.

Most of Vim users use GVim, and Emacs defaults to a graphical interface.
Not necessarily I believe. That assumption is pretty much community, geography, age, OS, and niche dependent. I use - and have for at least 10 years - a combination of Vim, Tmux, and the usual linux utils under Zsh (I actually used screen for the first few years) for my text editing needs. That being said, I learned Vim in Linux at the same time I was learning C when I was a kid. I've noticed that generally people that started on the Rails bandwagon (which I love btw) or on OSX as their first dev platform use Mvim/Gvim. That said, I've noticed the more "unixy" people using Vim on a terminal. There are exceptions to both rules of course.

Not my intention to get a debate going about this though, just offering a slightly differing point of view.

I don't know why, I actively dislike gvim and use vim exclusively from the command line... even though it has the same functionality.
Komodo Edit is pretty good too. Have you tried it?
I second that. It's free and works on both Mac, Windows, and Linux.
I've been coding for about 8 months and just used regular desktop notepad lol. So noobish but yea I'm trying to see what code text editor people recommend
WingIDE for Python... Notepad++ for other tasks
Vim. But I'm a little bit confused when using vim with big file, it's getting slow. It'd be great if any of you guys already have the solution
Might be your term if its slow vim will be slower... For example Osx terminal.app is slow...
This slowness could also be due to keeping a swap/backup file. Maybe try switching that off.

For that poster above, I've never understood the appeal of gvim or macvim, I am very happy with vim in a console (with tmux.) Perhaps there are some plugins that work better under (mac|g)vim.

I had a similar problem with editing large files with vim on terminal.

I switched to using iTerm2 and the heavy input lag disappeared

TextMate 2 is awesome. I compiled it from the source on Github, so it was free, and I love the little features (like auto-indenting HTML tags and autocompleting brackets and the like) and the language compatibility and plugins.
Emacs, but I start my students off using Sublime Text 2.
Enjoy? Enjoy is an interesting way to think about it. I guess probably gedit. Just enough features to be useful. If I could print from sublime text, I might put in the effort, because it seems like I could enjoy it.

Notepad++ is my favorite in windows.

Enjoy? Sublime Text 2.

Use most of the time? IntelliJ Idea.

For several years I was using Notepad++ (and before that PSPad) on Windows and Gedit on Linux, but I recently switched to Sublime Text 2 on both platforms. I also use NetBeans, mainly for coding in Java.
Vim, both in a terminal and in a GUI window. The learning was slow in the beginning but patience paid.