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I know several great programmers who use Notepad. I'm pretty decent at what I do and I use whatever is handy (from vim to IntelliJ) and I can't say I have maste

I know several great programmers who use Notepad. I'm pretty decent at what I do and I use whatever is handy (from vim to IntelliJ) and I can't say I have mastered any of them. And I just don't care, maximum speed is of little interest to me, quality is the important thing and the editor has little to do with that.

userbinator 8y ago
I know several great programmers who use Notepad. ...and now you know another one ;-) A lot of others are very surprised when they see me work without using any IDE, just multiple text editors and terminal windows. I don't need syntax highlighting or any other fanciness like autoformatting; in fact I find them distracting. I use Notepad on Windows and Vim elsewhere, and on the latter have Visual Studio only for its debugger (but will sometimes use WinDbg instead.) I believe much of why I do this is because I started without any IDE, sometimes even writing lots of code by hand on paper and thinking about it before entering it into the computer. When IDEs became available, I didn't see much point in changing my workflow. Contrast this with some coworkers who have such a plugin-ful IDE and are so accustomed to using it that they'd rather wait upwards of half a minute to open a source code file than browse to the file in the filesystem and open it with a text editor. These same coworkers also complain about why their machines are so slow... I wonder if those others you know also started the "old school" way.
- michaelgrafl 8y ago
  Whenever I use Notepad for quick edits it trips me up with its lack of Unicode support and inability to handle Unix-style line endings. I've tried to write (i.e. read) code without syntax highlighting for giggles, too. But I felt like it really slowed me down (i.e. cost me more energy to focus). You know there is a middle ground between Notepad and Visual Studio, in various places on the spectrum, right?
  - tdeck 8y ago
    Notepad also has an undo "queue" only one level deep. When I last used it I found that very frustrating, particularly in a non-modal editor where it's not clear what counts as a single change.
- Dewie3 8y ago
  I know many conceited programmers ;)
jussij 8y ago
> quality is the important thing and the editor has little to do with that. If you consider that the final outcome of any programming exercise is a text file then yes, any editor can be used to produce that file. Also the quality of the code found in that file is entirely dependent on the quality of the programmer and not the editor used. However, what a good programmer's editor brings to the table is the ability to produce that same code in a shorter period of time.

userbinator 8y ago

I know several great programmers who use Notepad. ...and now you know another one ;-) A lot of others are very surprised when they see me work without using any IDE, just multiple text editors and terminal windows. I don't need syntax highlighting or any other fanciness like autoformatting; in fact I find them distracting. I use Notepad on Windows and Vim elsewhere, and on the latter have Visual Studio only for its debugger (but will sometimes use WinDbg instead.) I believe much of why I do this is because I started without any IDE, sometimes even writing lots of code by hand on paper and thinking about it before entering it into the computer. When IDEs became available, I didn't see much point in changing my workflow. Contrast this with some coworkers who have such a plugin-ful IDE and are so accustomed to using it that they'd rather wait upwards of half a minute to open a source code file than browse to the file in the filesystem and open it with a text editor. These same coworkers also complain about why their machines are so slow... I wonder if those others you know also started the "old school" way.

michaelgrafl 8y ago
Whenever I use Notepad for quick edits it trips me up with its lack of Unicode support and inability to handle Unix-style line endings. I've tried to write (i.e. read) code without syntax highlighting for giggles, too. But I felt like it really slowed me down (i.e. cost me more energy to focus). You know there is a middle ground between Notepad and Visual Studio, in various places on the spectrum, right?
- tdeck 8y ago
  Notepad also has an undo "queue" only one level deep. When I last used it I found that very frustrating, particularly in a non-modal editor where it's not clear what counts as a single change.
Dewie3 8y ago
I know many conceited programmers ;)

jussij 8y ago

> quality is the important thing and the editor has little to do with that. If you consider that the final outcome of any programming exercise is a text file then yes, any editor can be used to produce that file. Also the quality of the code found in that file is entirely dependent on the quality of the programmer and not the editor used. However, what a good programmer's editor brings to the table is the ability to produce that same code in a shorter period of time.