

Ask HN: Why do you love your text editor? - tvorryn

 Or IDE? What features do you rely on the most? Less than obvious answers would be great. What I'm wondering is what the next great editor/IDE needs to do well in order to succeed.
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sixtofour
Vim.

I'm used to it (20+ years including vi).

Finger memory. Sometimes I don't know how I do things, they just get done when
I think about it. When I show someone something in Vim I sometimes have to
slow down and show myself first.

There's always something new to learn. That keeps it fun.

Emacs and Vim can do the same things, differently. Long use is what makes a
good editor, or IDE.

~~~
tompickles
I like that avoidance of the vi v Emacs war; but I do agree. You do good work
in the editor which you both know and have used.

~~~
sc68cal
I'm addicted to Vim's modes & shortcuts. If use an IDE, I end up installing
Vim emulators in VS2010, Eclipse, or NetBeans.

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qjz
I like vim because my primary user interface is 6 rows of approximately a
dozen buttons each. Vim lets me use them efficiently and to maximum effect,
without getting my fingers tangled in a game of keyboard Twister (sorry,
emacs).

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madhouse
I'm an Emacs user. I love my editor (or OS, as some would think of it) because
it has everything I need to do at my fingertips: no matter what I do, I hardly
ever need to leave it, if at all. That way, I have familiar keybindings all
over the place, it's scriptable and extensible, and documented better and more
extensively than anything else I've ever seen.

I can browse a projects git history, and follow bugzilla links, for example
(it's even possible to set things up so that different projects will lead to
different bug trackers). I can also easily poke around in said history. I can
find functions defined in a whole other area of the projects by using etags. I
have an integrated debugger, which shows everything I need, and more. I have
an email client with a ton of goodies (gnus threading is awesome, so is
scoring and a lot of other things).

And I could continue virtually forever, but in the end, the reason I like
Emacs is that it provides a familiar and integrated environment for every
single task I can think of, and it lets me extend and enhance it at my heart's
content.

~~~
HedgeMage
It bears repeating that emacs _grows with you_. You don't have to learn and
customize a new editor when you take on a new type of task.

From the time I wrote my first Linux config file, to when I started coding in
C (and through the next dozen languages I learned), from using RCS to CVS to
SVN to git and hg, when I was a security geek, a nuts-and-bolts coder, a web
developer, and a typesetter... I stuck with emacs.

I know folks who learned only a fraction of that breadth of computing tasks,
yet passed through six or seven editing environments, revision control front-
ends, and so on doing it. There was this extra thing they had to do --
audition appropriate IDEs and customize on to their liking -- every time they
learned something new. I'm confident I can pick up whatever language I like
without that overhead.

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CyberFonic
I'm with sixtofour, once you don't have to think about what to do, you speed
up massively. Personally I prefer vi only because I've learnt it. Changing
slows me down for very little gain.

For me, vi + git + make works well. Have tried most IDEs and keep coming back
to this combination. Use a second screen to refer to APIs etc.

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LarryA
I use a few, usually I am working most with Kate via Quanta and Gedit.

Things I like about them \- they are fast - to load up and fast to do
search/replace on large files.

\- in the case of Gedit it works with the filesystem which works with FTP so I
could do a quick edit on-line just by logging in and right-clicking a file -
very convenient.

\- Syntax Highlighting

\- In the case of Kate also auto indent and in Quanta the autocomplete and
highlighting open/close parenthesis, brace, bracket pairs.

What I would like to see is some editor that helps flag non-ISO-8859
characters.

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rshom
I use emacs. I love that I don't have to move much to do anything. Sorry vim,
but pressing esc before I execute a command is a pain in the neck. I also use
the no X version so that I can be browsing in the terminal and pop something
up really fast. Its wonderful.

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subsection1h
What I love most about Emacs is Org mode.

<http://orgmode.org/>

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Flam
SciTE because it is blazingly fast and 100% dependable. Use it for everthing.

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jawns
Because I built it myself :)

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taphangum
gEdit. Becuase it's simple.

