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Poll: Which is your primary text editor?
- chrisblum 13y agoSublime Text
- dmccunney 13y agoI 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.
- tehwalrus 13y agowoo 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.)
- middle8media 13y agoSublime Text
- Walckiers 13y agoPSPad (http://www.pspad.com/en/ http://www.pspad.com/en/)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- carbocation 13y agoEclipse (not currently an option in the poll except as "other gui")
- ankitml 13y agoIt is not a text editor.
- gutnor 13y agoWell, 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" ?
- ankitml 13y agoVim/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
- gutnor 13y agoExactly! 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.
- ankitml 13y ago
- ColinWright 13y agoAsked yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728866
- unsigner 13y agoScintilla 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.
- nikomen 13y agoI also use SciTE. It's extremely lightweight and easy to use.
- robertnn 13y agoVi != Vim
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dolcaer 13y agoI 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.
- theon144 13y agoWhat? 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.
- desipenguin 13y ago"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.
- adamors 13y agoMost 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
- peatfreak 13y agoThe 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.
- bifrost 13y agoYeah, I see people get lost going VIM -> NVI all the time. Kinda wish NVI had some of the vim macro/etc functionality in it.
- adrianhoward 13y agoOkay. 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.
- pyre 13y agoI'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).
- dasil003 13y agoThe 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)
- laumars 13y ago> 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.
- dasil003 13y agoSure 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.
- laumars 13y ago> 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)
- PavlovsCat 13y agoUltraEdit.
- ilkim 13y agoWriteMonkey
- webbedhands 13y agoGeany
- ifix 13y agoGeany. Eclipse for heavy lifting.
- mcourageous 13y agoVi
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hanula 13y agoVIM
- Qantourisc 13y agoVIM too here, since Vim wasn't on the list.
- zerr 13y agoPrimary: Visual Studio (for C++) Notepad replacement: Notepad++ Prolog, Haskell: Sublime Text (thanks to it, I can get rid of emacs completely)
- AndreasFrom 13y agoWhy do you want to get rid of Emacs?
- zerr 13y agoWell, 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.
- adamors 13y ago> primary text editor > Visual Studio
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dfox 13y agoWhile 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.
- SeoxyS 13y agoI 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.
- gmac 13y agoI've made this move recently myself, but I'm a little surprised how completely Sublime Text has hoovered up the TextMate constituency.
- viduthalai1947 13y agoSublime
- ekianjo 13y agoIsn't Geany missing?
- onli 13y agoYes. 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.
- atirip 13y agoMou
- railsshetty 13y agoVIM FOREVER ......
- rustc 13y agoIf 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.
- chalst 13y agoWell, 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.
- LeonidasXIV 13y agoTHere are people who don't use GNU Emacs?
- ralph 13y agoI assume he's thinking of things like http://www.xemacs.org/ http://www.xemacs.org/
- chalst 13y agoThat 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.
- johncoltrane 13y agoAre you really using Vi or the vi command "aliased" to Vim on most distributions?
- chalst 13y agovi 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 http://www.galexander.org/vim_sucks.html
- railsshetty 13y agoIn this Context, Consider vi == vim
- ExpiredLink 13y agoIn this Context, consider Context a text editor: http://www.contexteditor.org/ http://www.contexteditor.org/
- railsshetty 13y agoIn this Context, Consider vi == vim
- fox91 13y agoPyCharm
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ezraroi 13y agoNotepad++
- lmm 13y agoHow could you have forgotten the standard text editor, http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
- Gallefray 13y agoThanks for this. You just made my day! :D
- saljam 13y agoPeople 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.
- dfox 13y agoOn 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)
- wooptoo 13y agoGeany
- AbhishekBiswal 13y agoSublime :D , It's new-age VI.
- nimbix 13y agojEdit. 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.
- albertyw 13y agoTotally 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.
- lucian1900 13y agoIt's written in Java, and Swing to boot. People are unlikely to accept a slow, memory-hungry editor if it's not an IDE.
- grok2 13y agoIf 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.
- loranger 13y agoTextMate
- nicholassmith 13y agoWould 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.
- n0mad01 13y agodon'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 ...
- RBerenguel 13y agoI guess acme goes to "other gui"
- dexen 13y ago...and to "other cli" just as well ;-)
- laumars 13y agoI 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).
- RBerenguel 13y agoI 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)
- laumars 13y agoWith 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 :)
- brokenparser 13y agoEditors 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.
- antisol 13y agoSciTE - the Scintilla Text editor. very lightweight yet super-flexible!
- helgoboss 13y agoTried all, sticked with SciTE + Scintillua (for more lexers).
- tomrod 13y agoNo pico/nano love? Just kidding, I've only used it in dire emergencies too.
- marssaxman 13y agoNano 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.
- Gallefray 13y agoNormally Sublime Text 2 or nano. I really want to get into vi/m but I honestly can't get my head around all the shortcuts ;~;
- jurre 13y agoAre we gonna have one of these every other day now?
- gdonelli 13y agoXcode!
- coldtea 13y agoI think we have a winner.
- radimm 13y agoOut of interesting (OS X Users) - Emacs or Aquamacs?
- oddthink 13y agoEmacs. 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.
- hollerith 13y agoEmacs. 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.
- greyman 13y agoVisual Studio for coding, Microsoft Word 2013 for texts.
- laumars 13y agoDo 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.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoVisual 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.
- jaachan 13y agoEditplus - http://www.editplus.com/ http://www.editplus.com/
- hsmyers 13y ago+1 for Editplus. And all the others I use :)
- meerita 13y agoMacromates 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.
- rayprog 13y agoActually， it is vim with customizied plugins.
- kalleboo 13y agoBBEdit. Odd that TextWrangler is on there but not BBEdit. Maybe could be grouped together like vi/vim.
- mtct 13y agoKomodo Edit, and it's never listed.
- dhlavaty 13y agoPsPad ( http://www.pspad.com/en/ http://www.pspad.com/en/ )
- rajahafify 13y agoHard to beat ST at the moment. I'm guessing that it will eat Vi user as well in the future.
- abelardx 13y agoFor the pure editing of text, Vim is the clear winner. Whether that's all you want, is another question.
- swah 13y agoIf 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..)
- z92 13y ago: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.
- swah 13y agoHow could anyone use :bn and :bp? Its 4 keypresses!! :) Contrast with ctrl-tab.
- wting 13y agoI'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.
- micampe 13y ago
- swah 13y agoI wonder how many of us are completely fluent in Vim and Emacs and still use ST2/3?
- daleharvey 13y agoNot listed, but as a long time emacs user I have been (slowly) trying to make the switch to Adobe Brackets
- justplay 13y agoSince Textmate is ONLY available in Mac (not other OS) , that might the main reason why sublime2 succeed .
- leoaee 13y agoSublime Text
- ds9 13y agoGeany 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.
- obviouslygreen 13y agoGeany 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.
- expertmind 13y agoThere no XCode. Oh no.
- joe_bleau 13y agoCodewright!
- aardvax 13y agoI love vim
- snotrockets 13y agoWhenever 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/ 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.''
- johnxx 13y agoAnd just like the platypus, vi/vim will still be there as the counter-example to intelligent design.
- ranshu 13y agoI think everedit is a good replacement for sublimetext in windows. www.everedit.net
- BillSaysThis 13y agoTextMate
- dbish 13y agoI'm going to assume a vi vote is a vim vote. -1 for vi if that is not the case.
- snambi 13y agoWow.... VI and Sublime are close.
- LocalMan 13y agoGeany. 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.