
What's your favorite text editor/IDE? - zengr
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHhwMm9jS1l6RTh4Q3RBZU1GRWE1R0E6MQ
======
atgm
I would have said Notepad++ until I found Sublime Text 2
([http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-
text-2-new-...](http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-new-
version)) here on HN. A big shout-out to you guys. I completely intend to buy
a license when it comes out of Alpha.

~~~
giu
I actually bought a license after using the editor for quite some time. It's
the first time I spent money on a text editor, despite having the possibility
to chose from a number of free alternatives. For me, this money is really
spent well for various reasons, the most prominent ones being that the
software makes me happy and I really enjoy working with it.

I'm currently using version 2, too, and the developer is pushing updates on a
weekly base (<http://www.sublimetext.com/2>). I even requested a change in the
forums once; the developer kindly responded to my thread, and shipped my
requested change with the new version.

Awesome work, seriously!

~~~
rubergly
I've used Sublime when I haven't felt like setting up Vim or Emacs on Windows.
are there major benefits to Sublime 2 over the original?

~~~
giu
* ST 2 runs on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows;

* Auto-completion has been improved, in that you can now continue typing when the suggestions pop up;

* Other UI changes (new tab design, mini map has been moved to the right side, side bar, you can hide the menu when in full screen mode, etc.);

* A lot of other changes; I'd therefore recommend you to have a look at the change logs for more information: <http://www.sublimetext.com/2>

I had been using ST1 for quite some time before starting using ST2, and I
already was a fan of ST1.

------
bigiain
The greybeards all say "unix is an ide".

I think I first heard that from Tom Christiansen when he was heavily involved
in the Perl community back in the mid '90s.

Even today, some of the most productive programmers I know only use
X/Gnome/KDE(/OSX) as a means of organising terminals on modern hardware.

~~~
jasonkester
That's probably because they're mistaken as to what an IDE is.

In my mind, if it's not background compiling your code as you type, it's not
an IDE in the modern sense.

~~~
wisty
inotify? You can get the OS to respond to filesystem events, for example,
compiling as you type.

Scripting languages don't need this though.

~~~
jasonkester
_Scripting languages don't need this though._

Did you miss the reason why we're compiling while you type? It's so that our
IDE knows your codebase and can help you. It'll autosuggest things based on
context rather than simply matching strings. It'll inspect your object model
and stick in the right include directives for you. It'll let you rename things
without having to search&replace&hope.

So yes, scripting languages do need this. At least if we're talking about
things that your development environment needs to do to be considered a modern
IDE.

~~~
jcw
I'm surprised no one has suggested a vim or emacs plugin that does this yet.
Anyone?

I don't think this would be too difficult to write in vim, which has built-in
auto-complete functions.

------
zengr
You can take a look at the Spreadsheet here:

[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An4bm34gQOpddHhwMm9...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An4bm34gQOpddHhwMm9jS1l6RTh4Q3RBZU1GRWE1R0E&hl=en)

And you are most welcome to "mine" it too (please share the results) ;)

~~~
goo
Watching the live results is very entertaining. It's also the first time I've
cared about the built-in chatroom on google docs.

~~~
rnadna
You're right about the live results being entertaining. Possible google docs
has something to contribute, after all. Not that I'd be able to use it in most
of my work, because off-site storage has legal implications, where I live.

------
cagey
My own (call it "c").

At university (1985-9, EE major), there was (MS-/PC-)DOS (CP/M had faded into
oblivion). Unix was something heard of but not seen. There was no internet
(for starving students). The only sanely priced own-it-yourself computing
platform was IBM-PC (clone). I bought a used Sanyo MBC-775. I scrimped to
afford the Borland and MS C compilers w/student discount. The Borland IDE was
nice, but the MS compiler seemed qualitatively better. And the MSC package had
this powerful text editor M. It had almost no UI, but with its "reverse
polish" command syntax, box, stream and line selection modes with commands
accepting all arg types, I found it tremendously intuitive, Completely
customizable key assignments. A macro language. Unlimited undo/redo. It could
edit files > 640K (Borland's could not). The manual was well done for those
days, and included an API and build process for "editor extensions" (basically
DLL's before there were DLL's), which I was soon writing. I was hooked. My
brain-finger editor mapping was soon cast for life. Shortly MS replaced M with
PWB, which I tried but discarded (bloatware), sticking with M. Years pass,
during which I wrote a M clone, now a Win32 console app. Which I use today.
While I'm fond of unix (use it for servers at home), all of my employers have
been Microsoft-only shops, so my investment in developing my own text editor,
which I can change as my needs require, has been worthwhile. Editor vendors in
this market have come and gone (Brief, Codewright to name a few of the more
popular), and their users have been disrupted. I just "keep on truckin" with
my own... If the need arises, maybe I'll port to Linux/BSD.

------
schultzi
The lack of PHP on that list makes me feel dirty for writing it in.

~~~
zengr
My apologies. I missed it out by mistake and cannot make changes to the
spreadsheet now.

~~~
sharat87
well, as long as everyone puts in the exact string "PHP", it should be fairly
easy to mine

~~~
dools
I wrote "PHP bitches" since I found the exclusion of PHP to be rather rude
indeed.

------
xyzzyz
Emacs is more an IDE than text editor, though it may not look like one at the
first glance. Maybe if it had more windows opened by default...

~~~
calibraxis
Yeah, I think there's a spectrum of emacs use, between text editor and IDE (or
OS). For a while, I just used it as a handy text editor, and I wouldn't say
emacs was an IDE for me then. Now I:

    
    
      - installed autocomplete (with drop-down lists and tooltips)
      - org-mode is the first daily planner to impact my life 
      - run lint by hitting a button, linked to sourcecode lines
      - use REPLs
      - integrate different features naturally (like hyperlinks between my
        day-planner and sourcecode or a webpage; or hitting a button to
        clear/reset a bash terminal and restart the program in it)
    

Haven't gotten around to using emacs for email though... When I do, things
like org-mode will become even more powerful.

~~~
nemoniac
gnus FTW

------
mgrouchy
I'm a Vim guy, been using Vim for the better part of the last 8 years, kept
trying other stuff and ended up back at Vim every time. Figure I will just
stick with it this time :)

------
albertzeyer
Xcode is also quite handy as a simple text editor. I have linked all my
txt/py/sh/js files to be opened with Xcode. For most languages it has some
syntax highlighting support and it always has some semi intelligent
autocompletion.

~~~
dchest
If only it didn't launch in half an hour.

------
xutopia
I'm always using Textmate but I envy those who were able to suffer through the
pain of the vim learning curve.

------
beza1e1
Favourite language "C but not C++" is not available. However, i see that it
does not make sense to distuingish between them, when we are talking about
IDEs.

~~~
btipling
In the context of "what is your favorite language?", I think it makes a lot of
sense to separate them. I can put a checkmark on C but I can not put one for
C++.

------
btipling
C/C++ ? Really? Have you met many engineers who write a lot of C and who also
love C++ or vice versa because I sure haven't. I decided not to complete the
form after seeing 'C/C++'. Also, this is a flag if it's on a resume that the
person may not really know either language.

~~~
zengr
From a perspective of IDE/editor selection, does this matter?

~~~
dexen
It does for IDE. A mostly C tool may be extended to work with C++ but it's not
a perfect fit [1]. Probably it goes the other way around as well.

When used with inheritance, virtual functions, overloading and templates, C++
is much different semantically than the relatively straightforward C. Thus a
different tool is to be preferred.

\----

[1] that's my experience with the <http://cscope.sourceforge.net/>

------
johncoltrane
Surprisingly nice layout.

I've started with DreamWeaver in 98 or so. Around 2000 I started to jump from
one editor/IDE to the other until I settled with TextMate in 2006 or 2007. 5
months ago I commited to attack Vim's legendary learning curve. Now I'm almost
as productive as I was with TextMate and I LOVE Vim.

Lately I've dutifuly downloaded and tested the latest "advanced editors" for
Mac (Coda and Espresso) and found them totally useless: less useful features
than TextMate (which they aim to replace thanks to the delay of TM2), too much
focus on style… Pouah!

------
tehjones
Why combine c and c++ together. If you are using mostly C with some C++, you
are really using C++. If you are using C++, well you are using C++.

------
TamDenholm
Love gedit personally. Does all the basics that i need without a load of crap
that i dont want. For those that want the crap there are plugins.

~~~
wladimir
I agree that gedit is a very nice and light editor for code.

The only feature I _really_ miss in gedit is "Replace in selection". I use
this many times in refactoring code. There have been many requests for it but
the developers are refusing to add this basic feature.

------
paganel
I like it that there are at least 2 other programmers out-there using Python's
IDLE. All this time I thought I was the only one using it :)

~~~
mattdeboard
As a former IDLE user, I highly, highly recommend you take a week or two and
commit to learning emacs or vim (I recommend emacs...). It can be daunting but
once you get used to it you'll wonder how the hell you ever accomplished
anything in IDLE.

(If you decide to take the plunge with emacs, hit me up via email [it's in my
profile] and I'll send you a link to my config file.)

------
gaius
ActivePython is surely most often edited in Komodo? They are both ActiveState
products.

~~~
briancurtin
He may mean PythonWin, which is a part of the pywin32 package, which
ActiveState has distributed for quite a long time.

------
kbd
I've been using Komodo Edit for a while. It has a few quirks/issues but
overall I think it's the best editor that's not Emacs/Vim. I'm keeping an eye
on Sublime Text 2 though.

As for the link: some terrible choices. ActivePython is an IDE?

------
protomyth
I kinda miss PFE on windows. I've been looking for something on OS X that
would let me create macros and templates as easily. It didn't really have many
features but it was a good workhorse.

------
aufreak3
Damn! Can't type ω with option-03C9 even with the unicode hex input turned on
in macosx! Hope CΩ satisfies them :)

------
jerguismi
Why not to share results instantly?

~~~
whalesalad
I'm guessing this just goes into a spreadsheet, and at the end of the survey
the results will be parsed into some kind of blog post.

~~~
zengr
I might write about it, but I don't mind sharing the spreadsheet. After all,
the content is owned by the readers!!

[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An4bm34gQOpddHhwMm9...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An4bm34gQOpddHhwMm9jS1l6RTh4Q3RBZU1GRWE1R0E&hl=en)

------
ez77
Hey, three votes so far for ed! (Including mine, that is.)

------
dr_
Been using Wingwares python IDE. Not bad.

------
cnu
HTML/CSS isn't a 'programming' language.

~~~
frobozz
Or is it? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300836>

------
overred
vim,vs

------
matt2224
HASKELLERS, UNITE

------
NY_USA_Hacker
Well, I use Windows and am writing Visual Basic .NET with some ADO.NET,
ASP.NET, more usage of .NET, and a little usage of C. I write command line
scripts in ObjectRexx.

For how I'm typing in the code, I'm a happy camper.

I have various copies of Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio
(SSMS). My reaction to these two: I deeply, profoundly, bitterly, hate and
despise the intentions and the results.

I looked up their 'intellisense' in a dictionary and didn't see it. So, their
'intellisense' is more undefined gibberish.

Similarly for 'dockable'. It's not in my Funk and Wagnalls. So, more
inarticulate, illiterate programmers making up gibberish.

When I start Visual Studio, I see tiny windows, 'panels', as sub-windows of
the main window. The 'panels' are too small to be useful, and I have no hint
or clue about the purpose or usage of any of these 'panels'.

No, I don't want to see language key words and my identifiers in different
colors on the screen.

No, I don't want to type 'If' and have some software automatically type 'Else'
and 'End If' or type 'Try' and have some software automatically type 'Catch'
and 'End Try'. The idiot is that software and the fools who wrote it, not me,
and I don't want to be treated like an idiot.

No, I don't want some software to reformat my code. I have some tools to
format my code, and I do NOT want some 'studio' software to ruin what I
already did.

No, I don't want popups, pulldowns, rollovers, or upchucks.

No, I don't want command completion or argument list suggestions.

No, I don't want a program for "Hello world" to start with some dozens of
files in several subdirectories taking up 50 MB of space. And when things
break, I don't want to have to figure out what's in each of those dozens of
files to diagnose the cause of the break.

No, so far I've had no need for line by line interactive debugging changing
values of variables, etc.

No, I don't need Visual Studio to be able to create a DLL. The Visual Basic
command line compiler creates DLLs just fine with just a simple command line
option that takes only a few minutes to find, learn, use, and confirm that it
works.

I got told that of course I'd really need to use Visual Studio: As I made
progress from command line programs in Visual Basic to a working Web site with
Visual Basic, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET, there were super happy days as I learned
that, step by step, I didn't need Visual Studio.

I DO like the command line Visual Basic complier: It's fast, easy to use, with
meager necessary command line options, with decent error messages, so far, for
me, 100% bug free, and generates surprisingly small EXE files, has no trouble
finding the 'namespaces' in Import statements, etc. I'm happy.

I have used SQL Server Management Studio to inspect the results of what I did
with T-SQL statements executed with the standard program SQLCMD.EXE. Still,
even for system management and administration of SQL Server, I preferred to
write T-SQL scripts, GREATLY preferred.

Now that I've had some experience with SSMS, I can see that it's not good:
E.g., if use T-SQL to grant permissions to a user, then at least commonly
there will be no evidence of that in SSMS.

Besides, at first glance SSMS is a total train wreck: E.g., Name dbo is a
user, a role, and a schema, and THAT'S confusing. Then, what is in the role
and the schema is not easy to discover. Really apparently SSMS is not based
very directly on T-SQL but on another, Microsoft proprietary API called SQL
Server Management Objects (SMO). Gee, I just want to get MY work done, for
database as much as possible with just T-SQL, and for me SMO is a big detour.
Thus, so is SSMS.

So, for my 'IDE', I use my favorite text editor KEdit. I've been typing into
versions of KEdit for 25 years so have good facility and, thus, don't want to
type into anything else. I do a lot of typing and do nearly all of it into
KEdit -- blog posts, e-mail, notes, abstracts of Web pages of documentation,
letters, technical papers, Windows command line scripts, KEdit macros, other
code, etc.

So I'm thrilled that actually KEdit works fine for writing Visual Basic .NET
ADO.NET, ASP.NET, more usage of .NET, C, etc. Still so far all or nearly all
programming language source code is in just simple text -- GREAT!

Here's where IDE's go wrong:

(1) Software still has to be typed in, and a good editor is a good place to
type; the editors for IDEs suck, major suckage.

(2) IDE designers believe that what the 'beanbag cognitive psychos' at Xerox
PARC with 'graphical user interfaces' (GUIs) has to be the foundation for all
human-computer interaction. WRONG.

(3) The IDEs are conceptually constipated and obsessed with a single 'window'
into which they try to cram many 'panels'.

Instead, there is lots of 'windowing' functionality with just Windows.
Currently as I type this, I have 13 windows open, arranged with the UL corners
on a line from UR to LL so that I can easily find any window I want and see it
without moving any windows. Net, when I write software, I have lots of windows
open and, thus, ready access to much more information than in just the little
IDE 'panels'.

(4) With a good editor, e.g., KEdit, I can write macros, some for general
purposes, some for more specific ones. These macros are keys to my
productivity.

E.g., in my code, at some point where I should have a reference to some
documentation, I put a comment with the tree name of the file, often HTM, on
my computer with the documentation, and then a simple KEdit macro let's me
display the documentation with one keystroke.

As we know, a lot of code is really quite standard. So, with a good text
editor, can readily copy in standard pieces of code. More generally, the
ubiquitous Windows 'copy and paste' as the main way to copy blocks of text is
not good.

In my work, in a single function, I have standard integer variables
return_code, message_tag, and error_code and within the function set these
values as needed. Then I have a simple macro that numbers these sequentially
in the code. So, I don't have to number them myself. Then, when the code runs,
I can take one of these values, look in the code, and see where the value came
from. Works fine. That's too much to ask of an IDE!

