
Editor Overload - stopachka
https://blog.iansinnott.com/editor-overload/
======
donatj
When I try to discus editors with friends and coworkers, I often get pushback
about not wanting to “switch”. Have I got news for you, computers multitask
these days!

I personally often have a JetBrains IDE open alongside VSCode, Sublime and vim
because there are things each of them do better, or at the very least things I
better know how to do in each. You don’t need to replace a program you like,
you can just add to your menagerie.

Final unrelated note, all editor nerds should give Acme a spin. It’s a literal
trip. I never got comfortable enough with it to be productive, but I could see
it being amazing if you get your head around it.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Same; I use IntelliJ for the brunt of my work (no editor is faster than
automated refactorings & auto fixes), VS Code for random code, documents, and
scratch pads (usually using it for auto formatting as well), and vim for git
commit messages / interactive rebases, but mainly because git opening up an
external editor breaks my git flow.

Me and Vim never clicked. Mind you that may also be because I've not found a
good tutorial / practice thing yet, nothing that stuck or that pushed me to
get the various commands into my muscle memory.

~~~
rusk
I use IntelliJ for Java. There's nothing to touch it. What bugs me is that
every year or so they change things around and you have to figure out how
everything works again, or they discontinued support for a plugin for a
particular version of a VCS you were using ... (no I'm not bitter ;)

But I use Emacs for everything else. Emacs never changes how things are done.
It can't do Java the way I'm used to doing it though. It took me a whole heap
of work to get competency to a level I was actually productive with though, so
I can appreciate why it's a tough sell. Worth it though IMO. Though I pity the
person who has to pair program with me!

------
rvalue
Sublime still remains my go to text editor. For development, I definitely have
switched over to appropriate tools with larger feature support but nothing, I
say nothing, provides a blank slate of immense power and performance such as
Sublime Text does

~~~
8fingerlouie
I still use Sublime daily, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable
future, but i can see that VSCode is breathing down it's neck.

A couple of years ago i could have sworn that they had feature parity, but
these days it seems like VSCode is getting "all the cool plugins", while
Sublime has stagnated. The long development cycle probably doesn't help.

Sublime is still the king of speed. It launches in milliseconds, opens just
about anything you can throw at it, and does so without making a fuzz.

VSCode on the other hand spends seconds starting up, more seconds after
starting up loading plugins, even more seconds refreshing plugins until it is
finally ready after 10-15 seconds. It may not be a big deal if you only open
it in the morning, but if you have to open it multiple times a day it becomes
a chore, so much that i have reverted to Notepad++ for most trivial tasks.

VSCode will also open pretty much anything you throw at it, but where Sublime
will use very little memory opening a large log file, VSCode is in the GB
memory consumption range long before finishing reading it.

Of course, the above is only "Windows" problems, as any Unix based operating
system will have some form of Vi, which is my preferred editor.

~~~
arethuza
"VSCode on the other hand spends seconds starting up"

I tried this and was surprised to find that VS Code is quite slow to start.
However, opening subsequent files once the editor has started is fast and I
pretty much always have VS Code running so the slow initial startup doesn't
seem to be a big problem - at least for people like me who are terrible at
closing programs...

------
teekert
What I really like about VSCode is the remote-ssh plugin. This puts (at least
some) of the VSCode software on the server and things like Git and the runtime
you choose for your code (like the Python install) are on the server.
Especially my code needs to run on a batch processing cluster, so it needs to
be there and not local if I immediately want to use/test the code. So where I
used to work via Samba shares or ssh/Vim/Nano, I now open VSCode and add the
remote server to remote-ssh and boom, I can browse the filesystem and use Git
from the same interface, I can even have a terminal open to the remote machine
at the bottom of my VSCode window (if I want to do more fancy git stuff or
start programs). VSCode is now more like a client and plugins remain on the
server, the actual dev (local) machine becomes less relevant. Is there
anything similar out there?

Actually a colleague of mine use a Jupyter-lab install on the remote cluster,
he uses the Editor and Notebooks together to develop. This is also a nice way
to develop locally with the code remote.

~~~
calaphos
For me it's the single best feature about VSCode.

Extremely useful for projects which have an environment that is a bit tricky
to setup - so usually python. I can just run all my python projects on a
workstation or even some powerful cluster node and never need to mess with a
local python version on the windows laptop. A giant improvement over the
rather lackluster remote mode of Pycharm which needs a local environment to be
useful at all. It even supports a remote connection via a jumphost, e.g. for
cluster nodes behind another login node.

On the other end the editor is significantly worse when compared to Pycharm.
The refactoring is mostly unusable across files and more often breaks things
than helps. No perfect tool I guess.

~~~
mjakefranklin
Is PyCharm that much worse for remote development? I've been thinking of
trying it out

------
timw4mail
Hey, another user of Coda!

Coda (and Coda 2 on modern machines) is great for remote editing, especially
since you don't have to set up any plugins.

My favorite editors/IDEs by task: * Remote config file editing: Coda * PHP:
PHPStorm * JS: WebStorm * Rust: CLion * CLI text editing: Vim * Edit a random
file on Windows: Notepad++ * Edit a random file on Mac: VSCode/Atom

------
datagram
> until one day I discovered a plugin for VSCode that embeds Vim

Pretty much any editor with plugin support ends up with at least one Vim
plugin. In addition to VSCode, Sublime, Atom, and Emacs all have Vim plugins
(Sublime's is even built-in, but disabled by default).

To me this is the best of both worlds, since I can take advantage of all the
nice features from my IDEs while still having the efficiency of Vim editing.
Honestly, the thing I miss the most from full-fledged Vim is the Subvert
command from abolish.vim ([https://github.com/tpope/vim-
abolish](https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish)).

------
sneak
I liked the promise dangled by things like Atom and VSCode, but Atom’s
development has stopped and VSCode is spyware, in addition to all of the most
interesting features being in closed/proprietary plugins.

Text editing is one place I’ll absolutely never use nonfree software. In
addition to the privacy concerns (my editor has the highest security
requirements of any software I run), it’s also my most-used tool, and, as
such, must always be able to be inspected and modified, as it is an extension
of my muscle memory.

You might lock me into a cloud or an API, but my most critical tools that take
up the deep parts of my habits will remain under my control.

~~~
lioeters
> ..VSCode is spyware

As a daily user of the editor, I'd be curious to hear more. To be honest, it's
become an essential tool, and would be a challenge to replace. It's quite
excellent.

I know it's funded by Microsoft, whose operating system I'd consider as a kind
of spyware these days. But for VS Code, aside from the opt-in telemetry, and
the fact that it's built on Chromium, funded by an advertising giant who
thrives on invasion of privacy, is there evidence to justify calling it a
"spyware"?

OK, I admit that whole question might be an answer to itself..

~~~
sneak
Several other plugins serve as telemetry even if not explicitly intended as
such. Other extensions that have their own telemetry generally ignore the
telemetry setting on the editor itself.

One such example:

[https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/49161](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/49161)

------
baq
i'm a vim user for 15 or maybe even 20 years now.

vim is more of a text sculptor than text editor. the way you work with text is
next to magical.

that said, it shows its age. i'm now trying out - with quite some success -
vscode with remote-ssh. it's extremely nice to be able to use native OS window
and have everything happen on the remote side transparently. the vim plugin
works but as usual not everything is good: visual mode doesn't quite work for
copying lines, commands are missing, keybindings conflict with native, etc.
haven't looked at the neovim integration - next on the list.

~~~
spockulous
The neovim integration is better than the main vim plugin IMO, since it's not
trying to emulate the myriad features of actual vim. I wish the current top
Vim plugin had taken the neovim-as-backend approach. Oh well.

The noevim plugin is decent, and allows most of your vimrc mappings, but it
definitely has it's quirks. If the quirks got smoothed out VSCode + neovim
plugin might just be perfect.

------
hpoe
I can't believe I didn't see it on the thread yet but I am putting a plug in
for Doom Emacs.

I was a hardcore Vimmer for years, but I've heard so much about emacs I
decided to give it a try and after giving up on it once I tried Doom Emacs and
it is fantastic. Easily doubled my workflow speed and that is just learning
some of the basics. It takes a little bit to get used to but it is so powerful
and fast. In addition learning a new workflow and the world of Lisp has been
eye opening.

~~~
spockulous
Author of the post here and I'm curious, did you ever try Spacemacs? Not that
it's better or worse, but that's what got me into emacs. I'll have to give
Doom a try!

~~~
hpoe
I didn't try Spacemacs. When I decided to make the switch I looked at both of
them, the big thing that won me over was that Doom Emacs advertised being
lighter weight and quicker to startup which kind of sold me. I might be
interested in trying Spacemacs in the future but right now I am still trying
to navigate the Emacs world itself.

------
jansan
I have been down the same road.

Windows Editor - Laughable piece of crap with one single undo step!

Notepad++, Slickedit, etc: Nice for some quick editing and hacking. Quickly
fired up, but framework support is generally lacking.

Atom - feels super heavy for a text editor

VSCode - alright, but not really something will get you excited

WebStorm - Not free, but fucking great. Maybe not as lightweight as those
Slickedit, Notepad++ options, but awesome framework support and by far the
best diff tool that I know.

------
SirensOfTitan
I followed a similar trajectory:

1\. Dreamweaver

2\. UltraEdit

3\. Sublime Text

4\. Vim+tmux: clicked for me like a year into my career.

5\. Vanilla Emacs+Evil and a custom config.

6\. Doom Emacs: I started running into some slowness with my own config years
in, so decided to give doom a try. I’m glad I did: it’s so fast and really
intuitive.

------
Santosh83
Good article. Personally I'm pretty content with VS Code and Notepad++ for
more minor edits.

Interesting effect on link hover by the way. I can't decide if I like it or if
it's a bit too distracting!

~~~
schattschneider
I liked being surprised by it.

~~~
rusk
Ha Ha yeah it's cool - outrageous - have a look at his twitter link

------
hi41
Nice writeup op. At the end the blinking pairwise can give someone seizures.
It made it uncomfortable to look at it. Could you please please make it
unblink.

------
hewrin10
Have you tried Spacemacs? Vim + Emacs!!

~~~
spockulous
Yes! That's what got me into emacs. Still not yet fluent in it though, thus
the 3 editors...

------
rascul
The blinking/color changing thing when hovering over links is very painful for
me.

------
KorfmannArno
TextMate 2

------
xwdv
I’m sure if we did a study we would find the salaries of developers who use
Vim tend to be higher on average.

