Ask HN: Which text editor do you use, and why? - pyeu
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Jtsummers
Emacs, several reasons.

I learned to use it circa 2000 (after vim) while in university for my CS
degree. It took some getting used to, but it stuck.

It's incredibly versatile once you get to know it. It's wonderful having a
properly extendible tool. I wish every program I used was as easy to extend as
emacs. This is the same thing that drew me to Common Lisp (running programs
can be connected to and extended/debugged without having to stop them).

Lisp, I took to it very quickly. Not sure why but everything about it just
clicked in my head after a brief learning period.

It's default installed on everything I use except Windows. The Windows port
works well.

With emacs lisp, I have written up a number of (simple) modes to support
various esoteric languages I've run across in my career that no editor
supports (openly available but uncommon, or internally produced).

I don't have to use a mouse. Everything is available via the keyboard. Being
able to type about 100 wpm these days, that means I can instruct it as fast as
I can think of what I want it to do.

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cimmanom
On Linux, Vim, because its ubiquitous and powerful.

On Mac, BBEdit. Like the other BBEdit user in this thread, I've been using it
for over 15 years, and muscle memory counts for a lot. I also really love its
side drawer for managing dozens of open files (Sublime nominally has one but
it's an afterthought and not very functional), and think its symbol navigator
is very effective. I especially like the ability to have the same file open in
multiple windows in order to view different parts of it at the same time. And
nothing else I've used quite matches its incredibly rich multi-file
search/replace dialog or its search results displays (with a full listing of
all instances, organized by file, navigable by keyboard, opening to the line
in question in an editable buffer right in the window).

And it has so many incredible text processing features. Just to name a few, a
feature that will replace non-ASCII characters with their nearest ASCII
equivalents; a feature to find and process (in any number of ways) duplicate
lines in a file; the ability to reopen a file using a different encoding; a
built in diffing tool that will work on both saved files and unsaved buffers;
preserving unsaved buffers across restarts and system reboots; Markdown and
HTML preview modes; a menu for scripts to run against your files/buffers; and
the list goes on.

Oh, and it's stable. In 15+ years of use, it's never ever crashed on me. I
can't think of any other GUI program I can say that of. I've thrown 4GB files
at it on a machine with only 512MB of RAM, and it somehow not only opened and
rendered them nearly instantly but scrolled through them (and executed
searches and search/replace) like butter.

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jxub
VSCode. The startup time and speed are outstanding for something resembling so
much an IDE, specially for Node and other dynamic languages.

~~~
take4
It's pretty much the only Electron app I don't totally hate. I've grown to
like it after using it at work.

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eb0la
vi and Sublime.

On my home (windows) machine I use Sublime. It's the first editor I enjoyed
after a long time.

vi: because it's installed everywhere and - after working 20 years as a
sysadmin - I can blindly edit whatever config file I need on a terminal.

Some^H^H^H^H time ago I was using the IBM e editor
([https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-e-
editor/3x](https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-e-editor/3x)) on DOS because it
was easy in the eyes (dark and light gray vs yellow on blue) and had
autocomplete for C !

:wq!

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zapperdapper
Emacs. I wrote a few reasons why I still use it here:

[https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/why-i-still-use-
emacs.ht...](https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/why-i-still-use-emacs.html)

Every now and then I play with other editors, but always end up coming back to
Emacs.

There are some nice editors out there these days though: Atom, Microsoft's
Visual Studio Code is very nice too.

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tsul
vim:

\- I enjoy terminal apps in general due to the uniformity enforced by my
emulator’s text and color settings. And keeping my editor and shell in one app
fosters a custom IDE-like experience

\- I enjoy keeping my hands on the keyboard most of the time, though I have
mouse mode enabled for things like resizing splits

\- While I think you can be extremely productive in any of the big editors
today, with vim something about its modes and command syntax make it really
fun to discover new tricks and simpler ways of doing things

\- Some version of vi is on just about every *nix machine

\- The vim plugin ecosystem is very developed and plenty of useful ones to
check out

\- Similarly to plugins, there are thousands of dotfiles to peruse on GitHub
for inspiration towards making your editing experience even better

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sotojuan
Sublime because it's fast, does what I want, and I've been using it since
2012... lot of muscle memory and am too just used to it. I do have Vim
keybindings on but I'm a light user of them. I haven't tried much else,
honestly.

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mrks_
Depends on how much time I plan to spend and the size of the project:

vim - quick edits

Visual Studio Code - medium-sized projects, Python or JavaScript

IntelliJ IDEA/PyCharm - Java, or other large or complex projects

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mindcrime
On Linux (that is,most of the time) Emacs, because I can't stand modal editors
(eg, vim).

When I'm forced to use Windows, I sometimes use Notepad++ for some things.

For coding I mostly use Eclipse.

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csnewb
I enjoying using vim plugins in Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA. I get the best of
both worlds: all the features of an IDE + vim text editing functionality.

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Mononokay
Sublime Text: because EMACS scares me, Vim controls only work well for a web
browser, and because my preferred terminal font makes nano difficult to use.

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perilunar
BBEdit, since 1995.

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craftyguy
Vim. Because I hate having to use a mouse to edit text.

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pcunite
Notepad++ because of the excellent "find in all open documents" feature. The
way search results are displayed is good too.

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qubex

        Nano (or rather Pico) because I am the perpetual n00b whose mind was stunted permanently by Micorpspft’s EDIT.

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billconan
mostly sublime text. I occasionally use vim.

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SirLJ
vi - it's everywhere by default...

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romanovcode
Visual Studio Code

Notepad++

Visual Studio Express

~~~
eptakilo
This is exactly what I use:

Visual Studio Code: Front-end stuff, anything javascript

Notepad++: Scratchpad, any copy pasted code, quick snippets

Visual Studio: Backend stuff.

