

Best Text Editors - tpimental
http://lifehacker.com/385929/best-text-editors

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spydez
IMO, emacs wins just for it's sheer flexibility.

Yeah, it sucks at first, but if you're a professional text wrangler, you owe
it to yourself to try to master one of the big two (emacs or vim)...

I kept trying out emacs, getting scared off, trying it out again, scaring away
again... But I always came back because other text editors annoyed me with
their lack of ability to do exactly precisely what I wanted.

With emacs, whatever I want to do... It's just another line of lisp in .emacs.
Or sometimes another package in .emacs.d and another line in .emacs...

~~~
j2d2
I don't think it sucks much at first at all... Most people I know that have a
hard time with emacs don't want to learn anything fancy and think the arrow
keys are fine for navigation. Let them watch you program for a few minutes and
they'll be so impressed that they'll happily learn the new commands. OR,
they're not cut out for technology anyway...

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kaens
I had a bit of trouble with it at first, until I realized that I was supposed
to be pulling it apart and making it bend to my every editing whim.

The combination of keyboard-focused editing, on-the-fly extensibility, and
decently thorough and clear documentation has made emacs my editor of choice
for just about everything.

Not to mention that you can get a constant source of ideas to code to keep
yourself sharp, if that's your sort of thing.

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dkokelley
Now I'm not much of a programmer, so the answer may be obvious to some of you,
but why wasn't SciTE on the list? It's lightweight and does everything I need
it to. Maybe the others are just so much better than the rest.

<http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html>

~~~
berryg
I am using SciTE again. I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 and started using
GEdit. But, I was really annoyed with the text selection in GEdit (programming
in Python) and I missed replace within selection in GEdit. So, I switched back
to SciTE.

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es
As for me I just love TextMate. "E" is a good alternative on Windows platform.

~~~
aggieben
Emacs works nicely on Windows now too, and with a decent installer.

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truebosko
I have used pretty much all of those and then some (e, EditPlus, Komodo, etc)
over several years and the best the only one I finally fell in love with was
VIM.

Actually decided to use Vim cause my "e" trial expired and I have never looked
back. Been using it for a few months and text editing is so fluent, easy and
intuitive despite the strong learning curve. Take an hour or so each day (or
every few days) and do a chapter on the 500 page Vim book.

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bporterfield
EditPlus is a good one for windows development

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mikeryan
Been using UltraEdit for years and still love it on the PC, using TextMate on
my Mac. I'm a bit surprised BBEdit isn't on there - it seemed to be the
perennial fav for mac users for years.

~~~
whacked_new
How does UE compare to TM? I have never used TM before, but apparently E is
the one to compare with? I was a diehard UE fan for a couple of years.

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maxklein
What's wrong with using an IDE like eclipse or Visual Studio? That's what I
do.

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byrneseyeview
From the article: "From managing our to-do lists and writing code to jotting
ideas and keeping a grocery list, nothing beats a solid plain text editor." Do
you write all your text in an IDE?

And: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72774>

~~~
maxklein
I write code in an IDE and other text in notepad. I've never felt the need for
any other type of editor. Those fit my needs quite alright.

~~~
byrneseyeview
C-x b is my notepad.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
:tabnew is mine.

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jamongkad
Vim on my linux box. InType if I have to drop down to Windows.

