Poll: Which is your primary text editor?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5736367

by vishal0123 • 13 years ago

115 147 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

carbocation• 13 years ago

Eclipse (not currently an option in the poll except as "other gui")

ankitml3• 13 years ago

It is not a text editor.

gutnor2• 13 years ago

Well, not quite sure about that.

The only time I edit a text file outside my IDE is when I connect directly to a server, and in that case I use vi.

That seems ridiculous to chose Vi as my primary text editor, when 99.9% of my text editing is done in Intellij.

Well I abstained in this case, however where do you draw the limit ? If there was a poll about "What is your primary IDE" would Vim or Emacs not be listed because they are "just text editor" ?

ExpiredLink2• 13 years ago

Eclipse 'merely' includes several text editors and is primarily used for editing text.

arethuza• 13 years ago

Nothing stopping you using IDEs purely as a text editor if you want.

GFischer• 13 years ago

Similarly, I use Visual Studio for 99% of my text edits (ok, I work at a Microsoft-only company, and don't have much need for a text editor).

I do have Notepad++ installed, and if I had to say, I probably use Beyond Compare for my meager text editing needs.

If I switch to other software stacks, I'll probably use Sublime (although I'd like to keep on using an IDE).

Edit: I'm not the only one

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5736817

ColinWright• 13 years ago

Asked yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728866

stesch2• 13 years ago

And with Vim in it.

michael_h• 13 years ago

...and with emacs listed twice.

laumars8• 13 years ago

That probably didn't gain as much traction because half those items weren't text editors and he was missing a ton of IDEs to even make it a worthwhile poll in that regard. Plus Dreamweaver has no place in either such poll.

unsigner• 13 years ago

Scintilla embedded in our own Lua IDE; the same "engine" is used by Notepad++. I also regularly use SciTE, which is a small standalone Scintilla-based editor.

nikomen• 13 years ago

I also use SciTE. It's extremely lightweight and easy to use.

robertnn• 13 years ago

Vi != Vim

bifrost2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I see people get lost going VIM -> NVI all the time. Kinda wish NVI had some of the vim macro/etc functionality in it.

elmindreda• 13 years ago

vi != nvi != Vim

Try using heirloom vi or Solaris vi sometime. Even nvi adds a lot of convenience.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

Yes, only nobody cares about and nobody uses vi anymore.

Even the "vi" mode in a lot of distros is vim with a compatibility flag. And people only use it in an unknown system to edit some admin files in a hurry.

Vi in 2013 == Vim.

LeonidasXIV2• 13 years ago

Vi in 2003 == Vim.

adrianhoward• 13 years ago

Okay. I admit to being surprised by this. Despite being a Sublime user myself I had expected vi[m]/emacs to handily beat all other options.

pyre• 13 years ago

I'm sure there's a bit of selection bias by only polling the HN crowd (and at midnight on the west coast of the US / 3AM on the east coast -- a good portion of HN'ers are in SV).

dasil0033• 13 years ago

The geographical interpretation is strange. Why would you think Sublime would be relatively more prevalent than vi/emacs in SV?

(Also don't forget it's coffee time in Europe)

thejosh• 13 years ago

Would like to see some sort of breakdown for this based on something like traffic stats instead of a poll.

theanalyst• 13 years ago

There was a poll yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728866, this reflects that.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

UltraEdit.

ilkim• 13 years ago

WriteMonkey

webbedhands• 13 years ago

Geany

mcourageous• 13 years ago

hanula• 13 years ago

VIM

Qantourisc• 13 years ago

VIM too here, since Vim wasn't on the list.

zerr2• 13 years ago

Primary: Visual Studio (for C++)

Notepad replacement: Notepad++

Prolog, Haskell: Sublime Text (thanks to it, I can get rid of emacs completely)

AndreasFrom• 13 years ago

Why do you want to get rid of Emacs?

zerr2• 13 years ago

Well, I didn't like it. Never felt productive in it. It felt very awkward. The only reason I was using it was the support of non-mainstream languages.

Even when I was full-time in Linux, my go to IDE was KDevelop. And mcedit for simple text editing.

adamors• 13 years ago

> primary text editor

> Visual Studio

dfox2• 13 years ago

While my most often used local editor is emacs by far (and zile remotely), I also tend to use Visual Studio as simple text editor on windows. Some kind of Visual Studio shell is installed on almost any windows machine I need to use (be it Visual Studio proper, AvrStudio or something like that) and in contrast to notepad it does not have problem with LF newlines.

SeoxyS• 13 years ago

I find it interesting how much TextMate has declined. A few years ago, I believe it would have been the #1 response on this list. TextMate 2 these days, in the hands of the community, is truly excellent. The UI and UX has improved tremendously, and it is now free and open source. I imagine it is just too late. Everybody has moved on.

That said, I'm a switcher, too. I got fed up with the vaporware situation and moved to vim full-time a few years ago. I couldn't move back now.

jongold• 13 years ago

Sublime Text 2 is kind of the spiritual successor to TextMate.

schlecht• 13 years ago

And Sublime Text 3 the successor of Sublime Text 2.

btipling• 13 years ago

Given that Sublime Text does not look like a Mac app, and that TextMate was a Mac only app that looked very much like a Mac app, I find it to not be 'spiritual successor' in any shape or form. Sublime Text 2 is a cross-platform application. Having said that, Sublime Text has borrowed some good ideas from TextMate, but many editors do that these days.

gmac• 13 years ago

I've made this move recently myself, but I'm a little surprised how completely Sublime Text has hoovered up the TextMate constituency.

ekianjo• 13 years ago

Isn't Geany missing?

onli• 13 years ago

Yes. And Geany is my choice as well. Pretty, good as a editor, with some features of an IDE I never use (but others I do use), and customizable enough.

atirip• 13 years ago

Mou

railsshetty2• 13 years ago

VIM FOREVER ......

rustc• 13 years ago

If you can still change the options, please change Vi to Vim, as I'm sure most of the people voting for it actually mean Vim.

chalst3• 13 years ago

Well, vi is the editor I use 2nd most (after Emacs), but I use nvi nearly as often as I use vim, and I avoid the vim extensions (except the useful :help).

I imagine changing vi to vim would be a bit like changing Emacs to GNU Emacs.

LeonidasXIV2• 13 years ago

THere are people who don't use GNU Emacs?

johncoltrane2• 13 years ago

Are you really using Vi or the vi command "aliased" to Vim on most distributions?

railsshetty2• 13 years ago

In this Context, Consider vi == vim

ExpiredLink2• 13 years ago

In this Context, consider Context a text editor: http://www.contexteditor.org/

fox91• 13 years ago

PyCharm

ezraroi• 13 years ago

Notepad++

lmm• 13 years ago

How could you have forgotten the standard text editor, http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

saljam• 13 years ago

People often underestimate the power of ed. It's very useful when terminals are misbehaving and curses editors no longer work, or in shell scripts which modify files. (Ed commands in here documents.)

Ed anecdote: A friend of mine once wanted to make an inverted version of sed, which takes commands on stdin and applies them to a file named in the arguments. I think he called it fsed. I facepalmed and gave him my copy of The UNIX Programming Environment.

dfox2• 13 years ago

On more than one occasion I ended up editing files by piping them through sed because even ed didn't work (it tends to require writable /tmp or something like that)

prima-facie• 13 years ago

Geany

AbhishekBiswal• 13 years ago

Sublime :D , It's new-age VI.

nimbix• 13 years ago

jEdit. I'm surprised nobody seems to be using it considering how powerful it is. I have tried many editors over the years and SublimeText is the first one that comes close to it; but jEdit still has much better search functionality, especially in 'hypersearch' mode.

lucian1900• 13 years ago

It's written in Java, and Swing to boot. People are unlikely to accept a slow, memory-hungry editor if it's not an IDE.

grok2• 13 years ago

If jEdit were written in something other than Java, then it truly would have been an emacs successor. Unfortunately it's Java background is simultaneously both it's weakness and it's strength.

albertyw• 13 years ago

Totally love jEdit, especially the search functionality. I've been using it for more than 7 years now, though development of jEdit and plugins have slowed in recent years. I've tried using Sublime and Notepad++ but both of them don't feel right.

loranger• 13 years ago

TextMate

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

Would not have put Sublime in front of Vi/Vim but there we go, it is a truly excellent text editor despite the qualms about it not being programmable.

n0mad01• 13 years ago

don't know what to choose.

i'm making something like a transition from vim to sublime, so right now i use both equally.

but it seems to me that using vim on the server in a screen or tmux session is the right thing to do ( no need to leave into bash whatsoever ), while it's extremely pleasant to edit source files over sftp.

so i think i'll choose to use this combination ...

RBerenguel4• 13 years ago

I guess acme goes to "other gui"

dexen• 13 years ago

...and to "other cli" just as well ;-)

laumars8• 13 years ago

I wouldn't have said so. Even ignoring the fact that it's a GUI app, it's also mouse driven. And the "CLI" aspect of Acme is really just a novel way of implementing shortcuts and macros, but since those functions are non-interactive, it's not really behaving like a command line.

At risk of nitpcking, I think the "other CLI" option should have read "other console based" (that is, unless they were expecting people to answer with the likes of sed hehe).

brokenparser• 13 years ago

Editors like joe and pico don't fit anywhere. They are neither CLI or GUI based. And no one in their right mind ever chooses to use a line-oriented editor as their primary editor. Even serial programmers don't do that.

antisol• 13 years ago

SciTE - the Scintilla Text editor.

very lightweight yet super-flexible!

helgoboss• 13 years ago

Tried all, sticked with SciTE + Scintillua (for more lexers).

tomrod• 13 years ago

No pico/nano love?

Just kidding, I've only used it in dire emergencies too.

marssaxman• 13 years ago

Nano is my preference for a linux editor. It is simple, it stays out of my way, there's nothing to memorize, there's no Java, and the syntax highlighting is decent.

When I worked at Google, I did all my coding in a custom version of nano which I'd hacked up to show an 80-column marker.

jurre• 13 years ago

Are we gonna have one of these every other day now?

gdonelli• 13 years ago

Xcode!

coldtea2• 13 years ago

I think we have a winner.

radimm• 13 years ago

Out of interesting (OS X Users) - Emacs or Aquamacs?

oddthink• 13 years ago

Emacs. Aquamacs was just too weird. scratch wasn't in lisp-interaction mode, I had to change too many things to get normal behavior (opening multiple frames vs just buffers, etc.), and so on.

hollerith• 13 years ago

Emacs.

I consider Aquamacs's stated goal to be a worthy goal, but Aquamacs does not actually change Emacs's behavior to be more like an ordinary GUI app in situations I care about.

For example, in Emacs, if you use the pointing device to select an extent of text then hit the right (left) arrow key, the selection is increased in size by one character to the right (left). In contrast, the vast majority of GUI apps on Windows, OS X and Linux inactivate the selection leaving the insertion point at the right (left) edge of where the selection was (and you can get the behavior that Emacs uses by modifying the right-arrow key press with the shift key). Aquamacs chose the Emacs way of behaving here.

In summary, most of the choices Aquamacs made for when to do things the Emacs way and when to do them the standard GUI way differ from the choice I would have made.

P.S. In the situation examined above, the behavior of Acme (tested on plan9port on OS X) also differs from standard GUI behavior, but in a way different from how Emacs differs: Acme inactivates the selection, but then moves the insertion point one character to the right of the right edge of where the insertion point was, which makes some sort of internal logical sense (if the selection is considered to be a sort of insertion point that has temporarily stretched to be n characters wide) but is a poor design decision for Acme users that have to switch back and forth between Acme and other GUI apps.

greyman• 13 years ago

Visual Studio for coding, Microsoft Word 2013 for texts.

laumars8• 13 years ago

Do you not find MS Word a little overkill for working with plain text? Surely at the very least you'd want something that defaulted to monospaced fonts and didn't add formatting to your selections.

seanmcdirmid• 13 years ago

Visual Studio works better than Word for plain text, but I rarely deal with text anyways, its always some kind of code. The only thing I don't use Visual Studio for is LaTeX, where TeXnicCenter works better.

jaachan• 13 years ago

Editplus - http://www.editplus.com/

hsmyers• 13 years ago

+1 for Editplus. And all the others I use :)

meerita• 13 years ago

Macromates made a big mistake on delivering Textmate 2. First, it took ages. Second, it delivered a really slow editor compared with the speed of Sublime and third the communication with the community was almost inexistent.

rayprog• 13 years ago

Actually， it is vim with customizied plugins.

kalleboo• 13 years ago

BBEdit.

Odd that TextWrangler is on there but not BBEdit. Maybe could be grouped together like vi/vim.

mtct• 13 years ago

Komodo Edit, and it's never listed.

dhlavaty• 13 years ago

PsPad ( http://www.pspad.com/en/ )

rajahafify• 13 years ago

Hard to beat ST at the moment. I'm guessing that it will eat Vi user as well in the future.

abelardx2• 13 years ago

For the pure editing of text, Vim is the clear winner. Whether that's all you want, is another question.

swah4• 13 years ago

If only working with multiple files was easier... what are you guys using these days ?

[edit]

Also, one thing that shows how Vim is oriented towards opening and closing it all time is that preventing acidental quitting is quite hard to achieve (only with hacks..)

z92• 13 years ago

:bn [buffer next] :bp [buffer previous]

:bn is mapped to backslash on my installation.

:b <tab> for a list of all open files where you can pick the one you want to switch to. Mapped to ",." on my machine.

vim might have its problems. But buffer switching isn't one, for me.

wting• 13 years ago

I've aliased vim -> "vim -p" which opens files into multiple tabs when passed as arguments.

I've rebound the arrow keys to switch and move tabs and buffers.

* up/down: previous/next buffer

* left/right: previous/next tab

* shift left/right: move tab to left or right

    inoremap <Up> <esc>:bprev<cr>
    inoremap <Down> <esc>:bnext<cr>
    inoremap <Left> <esc>:tabprev<cr>
    inoremap <Right> <esc>:tabnext<cr>
    noremap <Up> :bprev<cr>
    noremap <Down> :bnext<cr>
    noremap <Left> :tabprev<cr>
    noremap <Right> :tabnext<cr>
    nnoremap <silent> <S-Left> :execute 'silent! tabmove ' . (tabpagenr()-2)<CR>
    nnoremap <silent> <S-Right> :execute 'silent! tabmove ' . tabpagenr()<CR>

As for working with multiple files easier when vim's already open, it's a combination of Command-T, Buffer Explorer, and NERD tree.

micampe• 13 years ago

The only vim plugin I use: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1664

With a few mappings:

    noremap <leader>b :ls<cr>:buffer 
    noremap <C-a> :b#<cr>
    noremap <C-h> :bprev<cr>
    noremap <C-l> :bnext<cr>

johncoltrane2• 13 years ago

What do you call "accidental quitting"?

stray• 13 years ago

You misspelled "emacs".

abelardx2• 13 years ago

I like both, but Vim's modal nature and the consequently far fewer control combinations make it much faster for editing text. On the other hand, emacs' language-specific modes and built-in repl-in-the-editor support is awesome.

swah4• 13 years ago

I wonder how many of us are completely fluent in Vim and Emacs and still use ST2/3?

daleharvey• 13 years ago

Not listed, but as a long time emacs user I have been (slowly) trying to make the switch to Adobe Brackets

justplay• 13 years ago

Since Textmate is ONLY available in Mac (not other OS) , that might the main reason why sublime2 succeed .

leoaee• 13 years ago

Sublime Text

ds9• 13 years ago

Geany on Linux, JEdit on Windows. Line numbers, full paths, reasonable cursor behavior, color-coding for various languages, plugins, keybindings are mostly conventional and fully configurable, etc. - and both are GPL.

obviouslygreen2• 13 years ago

Geany here as well. Along with a Guake terminal it's extremely convenient for Python development and doesn't get in your way.

For Android I use Eclipse, but hopefully the new editor from Google will be an improvement.

expertmind2• 13 years ago

There no XCode. Oh no.

joe_bleau• 13 years ago

Codewright!

aardvax• 13 years ago

I love vim

snotrockets3• 13 years ago

Whenever I stumble into a "best editor" discussion, I am reminded of the words of Kieran Healy that adorn the top of my init.el (from http://kieran.healy.usesthis.com/):

``But even if TextMate 2 drops from the sky fully-formed and marveled at by all, Emacs will still be there, waiting. It will be there when the icecaps melt and the cities drown, when humanity destroys itself in fire and zombies, when the roaches finally achieve sentience, take over, and begin using computers themselves - at which point its various Ctrl-Meta key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe’s Intelligent Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God.''

johnxx• 13 years ago

And just like the platypus, vi/vim will still be there as the counter-example to intelligent design.

ranshu• 13 years ago

I think everedit is a good replacement for sublimetext in windows. www.everedit.net

BillSaysThis• 13 years ago

TextMate

dbish• 13 years ago

I'm going to assume a vi vote is a vim vote. -1 for vi if that is not the case.

snambi• 13 years ago

Wow.... VI and Sublime are close.

LocalMan• 13 years ago

Geany. We need something better than Syntax Highlighting. Something along the lines of the original Literate Programming. At least different fonts and styles for different syntax elements. Each package or multi-file module should have it's own background texture.

If you've got time and money to spare, and want to improve the editor you produce (not just use) then learn from the $300 SlickEdit editor. It does a lot of things right. And there's a go package for it.

chrisblum• 13 years ago

Sublime Text

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

woo textpad! I haven't used it for years, but I did buy it at one point. I mostly used it for editing ActionScript 2, because the Flash CS4 editor just failed to do anything if you weren't using the latest and greatest language (you couldn't even configure spaces instead of tabs in the autocomplete ffs!) I was pretty hot on my textpad shortcuts and hacks. :)

Nower days I mostly work in Eclipse inside a Linux VM (convoluted, but I've found Eclipse in OS X to be severely deficient for python - and I can work on files on my host filesystem via a shared folder.)

When I need to edit in Mac OS I use Textmate 2, but I've never actually used any of the magic of Textmate beyond the syntax highlighting (and the latex compile-to-PDF key shortcut.)

dmccunney• 13 years ago

I don't have just one. Under Windows, I use a fork of Florian Ballmer's Notepad2 to replace Notepad. It's one of a number of editors based on Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control. It's small, starts fast, and can replace Windows Notepad through a registry hack. I also have Notepad++ and an assortment of other things installed.

Under Linux, I use Vim, emacs, and Geany, which is a lightweight IDE also based on Scintilla.

middle8media• 13 years ago

Sublime Text

Walckiers• 13 years ago

PSPad (http://www.pspad.com/en/)

Poll: Which is your primary text editor?

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