Ask HN: Best code editor?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=793629

by hajrice • 17 years ago

34 133 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi, I currently use Notepad++ which I'm really satisfied with. I love Visual Studio but is just a hastle to work with sometimes(long loading time, not useful when working with 1 code file(etc), no reason to create a new "web project" instead of a file, etc).

I'd love to know what you use and if you're satisfied with it?

jaddison2• 17 years ago

UltraEdit and Komodo are good. Komodo has a free version, I think.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Komodo Edit. It's open source.

http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

jaddison2• 17 years ago

True, I should have mentioned that!

CraigBuchek• 17 years ago

I've been using Komodo Edit a lot lately. The nice thing is that I get the same editor in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. And the snippets are nice, similar to TextMate.

TheElder• 17 years ago

I use ultra edit nearly every day. I love search/replace with regular expressions.

barredo2• 17 years ago

Loved ultraedit when I was a "Windows-guy"

camflan• 17 years ago

vim

hgimenez• 17 years ago

+1, vim hands down. Cross platform, powerful, lightweight, configurable, etc

RiderOfGiraffes2• 17 years ago

another +1, but you need to learn to use it properly. Tags, windows, changing files, external commands, macros, etc. It's not user friendly, in fact it's downright user hostile, but it's powerful, and written for hackers.

mrshoe• 17 years ago

vim is one of the most user friendly pieces of software I have ever used. The interface is incredibly efficient. The designers put great effort into making sure that common tasks were one or two keystrokes that usually don't even require moving your fingers off the home row.

Just because it's not the most discoverable interface doesn't mean it's user hostile. I wish more software designers would look at vim as an example. A text editor falls into the category of software which users spend a ton of time using. For those types of software a steeper learning curve is completely accpeptable if it means the users can operate the software without even consciously thinking about it once they've learned how to use it.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

You're very right. I've been using it for years and I still haven't gotten around to 'properly' learning vim.

It's not exactly laziness, it's more that I got really spoilt at some point in the past by writing my own editor, but maintaining and porting it to new platforms as well as lots of work on customer machines has made it infeasible to keep the project going.

So, I use vim. But at the bare minimum level, I really should go and do something about that.

Thanks for the prod!

mhansen4• 17 years ago

Downright user hostile? Vim has the best help system I've ever used. Everything is documented, and a few keystrokes away

thismat3• 17 years ago

You don't really have to learn how to use all the bells and whistles for it to be effective and ideal. Heck, I use it because it saves me having to transfers files or allows me to develop on a separate box through ssh if I don't feel like setting up expand drive or the likes.

Also, hjkl is the most beautiful thing I've ever experienced, I constantly wish TextMate and VisualStudio gave me the separation from edit/navigate mode like VIM does.

aditya• 17 years ago

I'm curious if anyone is using vim on windows as the OP mentioned he is using Notepad++ and Visual Studio (both Windows environments)? If you are using vim, what has your experience been like?

erlanger• 17 years ago

Works fine. Unfortunately, developing without Unix stinks. and Cygwin is a hack (very slow). Vim is much more powerful with Unix tools on hand. I learned Vim on XP (no choice of OS, so it was the best choice).

mhansen4• 17 years ago

I use it with cygwin, because the unix utilities are a must have.

You can use it natively, and it works fine too, but I really like my unix utils

mhansen4• 17 years ago

Vim tutorials, splitting the beast into manageable chunks:

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...

mun2mun4• 17 years ago

I also like vim but I sometime feel jealous of the emacs users for debugging and org mode.

lucifer• 17 years ago

Read this a while back and remember enjoying it quite a bit. (He talks about vi + other stuff).

[Original source seems to be unavailable at the moment]:

Interview with Bill Joy, August 1984, Unix Review magazine http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:N14AkASeqMoJ:www.cs.pdx....

nollidge• 17 years ago

Is there a "learn you a vim" or "poignant guide to vim" out there? Because the handful of times I tried vi/vim I got some stuff done, but didn't really grok it.

This goes for Emacs, too. I get the feeling I've never really used these tools the way they're meant to be used.

thristian• 17 years ago

The best way to start with Vim is the included 'vimtutor' command, which opens up a document that guides you through basic editing operations (on itself).

After that, being around other Vim users (in person, on the vim-users mailing list, or subscribing to the !vim group on identi.ca, etc.) is best - being able to ask someone "Is there a better way to do X?" or have someone watching over your shoulder say "I can't believe you're doing that the slow way!" is a great way to learn.

The best long-term solution, I've found, is to remember that laziness is one of the great Programmer Virtues, and pay attention whenever some editing task gets tedious, and take a moment to look for a solution in the (amazing complete and well-indexed) Vim online help (":help") and perhaps the Vim Tips site (http://vim.wikia.com/)

mun2mun4• 17 years ago

you can check out these links http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html, http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html, http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html. I loved vim after reading these articles.

wenbert• 17 years ago

I have tried to use Vim a few weeks back. It works great. I have the minibuffexplorer and NERDTree installed. So it was basically like an IDE for me.

BUT everything goes downhill when the "window" arrangements are messed up. I am like, WTF did this open in the upper window. HTF do I move this "window/screen" from A to B. When this happens, I restart Vim and then open the files again. Really annoying. I wonder how expert Vim users go about this issue? Any tips?

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

:h windows

I prefer using tabs with Vim. Here's a short overview:

* :tabnew to open a new tab.

* :tabe <FILENAME> to edit a file in a new tab.

* :q or :close to close a tab.

* :tabnext and :tabprevious to move between tabs.

* Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDown are bound to :tabnext and :tabprevious. On my MacBook, I bind those to Cmd+[ and Cmd+].

* And, of course, :h tabs to find help.

doki_pen• 17 years ago

I use my window manager for managing windows, unlike a lot of vim users. Most ppl don't think about it too much, but maybe your window manager is the problem? Maybe it should do what you want vim to do. Have a look at a tiled wm like dwm, wmii or awesome.. etc...

JunkDNA• 17 years ago

I recently discovered mvim on OS X and it really convinced me to buckle down and start to learn and more importantly use vim again as my primary editor. One thing I find is that you need to do a fair bit of customization before vim fits for you. I stumbled onto Todd Werth's vim configs (http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/9) and they were immensely helpful to me in finding ways to make vim more useful and efficient. For most of the coding I do, vim is now my favorite editor.

That said, it does depend on what kind of development you're doing. I think that in some cases, you can make life harder for yourself by straying from what most developers in your chosen language/framework are using. If I need to code up some .Net stuff, I'm going to use the MS tools. Likewise, if I'm doing heavy Java work, I'm going to likely use Eclipse (even if it's a tad bloated for my taste). If I'm on the Mac doing iPhone development, I'm going to use XCode. Sure, I could use vim for all of the above, but these IDEs are already very well optimized for their respective languages, and vim feels a bit out of place for me.

rphillips• 17 years ago

Derek Wyatt is creating a very nice screencast series on Vim.

Check it out: http://derekwyatt.org/

alx2• 17 years ago

Textmate

barredo2• 17 years ago

Love textmate, use it as main text editor, but it's time for Textmate 2 and its split-screen option.

davepeck• 17 years ago

TextMate needs split-screen today. It still surprises the hell out of me that they haven't issued a 1.X point release that adds this feature. WTF?

Sapient3• 17 years ago

Or the Windows clone, e-Texteditor. Macs are far too expensive in Africa...

AdamGibbins• 17 years ago

Macs are overpriced everywhere Sapient, I don't think its specific to Africa ;-)

pWneD• 17 years ago

I'm also a TextMate lover. +1

lleger• 17 years ago

VIM is awesome, spectacular even, but if you're on a Mac, you just simply have to use Textmate. It's really just an amazing piece of software.

Who else here is totally stoked about the free 2.0 update?

jmulder• 17 years ago

Love TextMate. Also, need TextMate 2 _now_.

Use the latest 'unstable' build of Intype (www.intype.info) on Windows daily.

lewro• 17 years ago

Coda on MAC is great.

Legion3• 17 years ago

Coda drives me nuts just because it is Mac (not "MAC") only. I bounce from machine to machine, and I hate it when a tool I like on one machine is simply absent on the next.

I know Panic is all about Mac software, but I wish they would find a way to get apps like Coda up and running on other platforms.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

Yeah, the difference between Coda at home and vim at work (where I use Windows as a terminal client to Linux dev boxen) has driven me back to vim on my Mac as well, just to avoid the finger-confusion. :/

j792• 17 years ago

Coda is great! I use it along with BBEdit (which is an equally awesome, straight-shootin' text editor)

alx2• 17 years ago

nano

mahmud• 17 years ago

it takes a real man to admit that, bravo!

MrSomeone• 17 years ago

Crimson Editor.

nixme• 17 years ago

Emacs.

And yes, I'm very satisfied with it. Everytime I see a feature in another editor I like, EmacsWiki usually has an implementation or guide.

Plus emacs has org-mode...

mixmax• 17 years ago

Emacs isn't for everyone though.

I gave it a try around a year ago since a lot of people I respect (looking at you HN) seem to worship it. After around a month I still thought it to be arcane and backwards. I even posted here to get some feedback on what I was doing wrong (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313025) but we just never got along, Emacs and I. After around 2 months I went back to notepad++.

I'm not saying emacs is a bad editor, on the contrary, just that it's not for everyone and that it does seem to require a substantial effort before you're really productive in it.

yangyang2• 17 years ago

I used vim for over 12 years before switching to emacs. The thing that made me switch was looking at some insane vim-script to indent Python (or something like that - I don't rememember).

I love emacs now. Yeah it takes ages to learn, moving around isn't quite as quick as hjkl in vi, emacs lisp isn't perfect, but it really is worth it. Nothing is as powerful.

23 even lets you connect to a running process from a tty and GUI simultaneously.

And yeah - org-mode is great. As is the gdb integration.

jcromartie• 17 years ago

I started using Emacs for a job that used a custom framework built around an old version of a rather non-mainstream language. I found some Emacs modes for the language, but they were a few versions ahead of what we were using. I was able to hack them pretty easily. The thing that amazed me was exactly how much else I managed to squeeze out of Emacs compared to the other editors I explored. I had editor commands to jump around and create new files and run and test our stuff. Yeah it's a long slow learning curve, but in the end I had built a decent development tool for this particular job.

If I had used any other editor, it would have just been a text editor, and nothing more. With Emacs I could build real tools and multiply my effectiveness. If this job weren't Windows-only (yeah...) I would have used TextMate, but I think I'm better for forcing myself to learn Emacs.

grandalf2• 17 years ago

I've really enjoyed emacs... with the help of @technomancy's emacs starter kit:

http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

The starter kit serves as your .emacs.d and comes with some useful modes and easy customization.

I'm not yet maximizing all of the modes, but I am more productive than I've been in other editors, especially when it comes to switching between many open files with a few keystrokes.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

If you want to go commercial on windows check out ultraedit.

moai• 17 years ago

Geany

alrex021• 17 years ago

Aquamacs (Emacs for Mac)

http://aquamacs.org/

yangyang2• 17 years ago

I really didn't get on with aquamacs. It'll do your head in if you use emacs on other platforms.

You can use other emacs builds on mac OS. I use Carbon Emacs. Emacs 23 has a native cocoa build now.

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

It's great, though, if you are used to Mac applications and learning Emacs for the first time. Kind of like training wheels for Emacs.

intranation• 17 years ago

The 23 Cocoa build is a bit broken, though:

http://atomized.org/2009/08/cocoa-emacs-231-cvs-builds-and-t...

I've since reverted to the Carbon Emacs 22 build (since I can't cope without fullscreen).

greggraham• 17 years ago

I use aquamacs at home on my Macintosh, and GNU emacs on Windows XP at work. I have switched back and forth between emacs and vi/vim over the last 25 years because they are both great editors and have various advantages and disadvantages. I had been using vim back when I was using Ubuntu at home because the fonts looked better on vim than on emacs. Now that I have a Macintosh and can run aquamacs, I switched back to the emacs world. I admit I'm a sucker for pretty text.

vyrotek• 17 years ago

Visual Studio 2008 - Love it. I don't notice any load-time issues, but maybe thats because I never close it.

pmichaud• 17 years ago

VS is probably the best product Microsoft makes, it's spoiled me for other IDEs.

j792• 17 years ago

I'm a huge fan of VS as well. When I'm at home on my personal machine, it's always a bit of a letdown when Intellisense doesn't kick in...

TeHCrAzY2• 17 years ago

I don't understand, why do you not have intellisense at home? The Express editions have intellisense, right?

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

TeHCrAzY2• 17 years ago

Add in the combination of Resharper and Visual SVN, and it walks circles around anything else.

eworoshow• 17 years ago

With ViEmu it's my favourite environment in which to write and, more importantly, debug code.

travisjeffery• 17 years ago

I switched multiple times for long periods, learnt each's scripting languages, customized the hell out of each, wrote extensions and in the end right now I'm happiest with being a speed demon with my vim keybindings-fu.

But really the only editors worth learning and using are Emacs and Vim, decide between which one or use both.

johndoe77• 17 years ago

Eclipse

Legion3• 17 years ago

I have come to really appreciate Eclipse. It's come a long way since the first time I tried to use it.

Eclipse, plus vim in a terminal window, take care of all of my editing needs.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Eclipse (and intellij) are both resource hogs though.

timmfin• 17 years ago

Personally I bounce back and forth between vim, eclipse, and textmate depending on the project (eg: shell, java, web).

Also, I'd recommend eclipse users (that are vim fans) to try out viplugin (http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/). It is far from supporting all of vim's commands, but it has enough for me to feel comfortable.

baddox• 17 years ago

For Java, yes.

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

For a good while, I stubbornly stuck to Emacs for Java coding over Eclipse. I managed to hack together some Emacs-lisp to make it work OK. Occasionally I had to use Eclipse for one reason or another, but only grudgingly.

What won me over is the excellent refactoring support. That is definitely something that I was not going to be able to hack together with some Emacs-lisp. It just makes sense that rename, extract variable, extract method, etc. are atomic operations.

adatta02• 17 years ago

Eclipse for Java. Zend Studio (built on Eclipse) for PHP/Javascript

memorius2• 17 years ago

The latest Eclipse is superb in its java tooling, especially for large projects - great refactoring abilities, class hierarchy visualization, navigation, ant integration, plugins available for Checkstyle and Findbugs, etc. It's also a lot more stable and robust than I had expected for such a large IDE - I've had no real problems with it so far.

A much-underrated feature is the Mylyn task-focused programming system, which reduces information overload and saves you a lot of time repeatedly navigating around hierarchies and files. I've seen nothing comparable in any other editor.

There is also some great integration into bug tracking systems. My projects use Bugzilla, and I almost never need to visit the slow bugzilla web interface or wade through bugmail emails anymore - bug search and details, comment posting and bug change notifications are all right there in the Mylyn task list.

Before switching to Eclipse when the 3.5 release came out, I previously did all my Java work in jEdit, which I still use for other languages; I hate to think how much time I wasted by manually doing the tedious tasks that Eclipse could have automated for me.

I concede that you do need a fast machine, lots of memory and plenty of screen space, but it's well worth it for the time savings on the tasks for which it is suited.

sfk• 17 years ago

This thread would be incomplete without mentioning ed:

http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/religion/ed-standard

midnightmonster• 17 years ago

scribes http://scribes.sourceforge.net/

shawnjgoff4• 17 years ago

Thanks! That looks superb.

mdasen• 17 years ago

I'm a fan of NetBeans. It isn't for everyone. Sometimes one wants something lightweight. However, NetBeans has a lot of nice things. Refactoring helpers are wonderful. They make it so much easier to change the name of something when its meaning changes so that the code stays clean. Like many visual editors (rather than command line things like vim), it can do tabs and show a tree of files on the left pane. It supports a lot of different languages and even has some great hooks for running a project on your local machine. It can also detect some problems - unused variables, unused imports, syntax problems, etc. which means that you can catch small errors fast.

It does have its faults (like any piece of software), but it can be very helpful.

_sh• 17 years ago

I spent an afternoon wandering around the NetBeans profiler and have not opened Eclipse since. It has spoiled me.

http://www.netbeans.org/features/java/profiler.html

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

I recommend NetBeans to Ruby developers who, for whatever reasons, can't get into Vim. It has really nice Ruby support, which is especially handy if you're doing Rails and want to get a grip on the mass of directories and files.

Plus the GUI editor kicks ass for doing JRuby Swing stuff.

Icing on the cake: There's a vi plugin. :)

drhowarddrfine• 17 years ago

Google the same question and join the thousands of other threads that have asked the same question just in the past week. Continue on to find the millions of threads that asked the same question over the past decade.

th0ma5• 17 years ago

jedit

shawnjgoff4• 17 years ago

Jedit is amazing. It's like the Firefox of text editors - not the smallest or fastest, not the biggest or slowest, but reasonably quick and very very extensible. I would say that other tools (vi and especially emacs) are also very extensible, but Jedit has no learning curve and fits in well with Windows.

That said, I'm slowly becoming more efficient in vi and it will eventually overtake Jedit for myself.

andrewl• 17 years ago

I used jEdit for a long time. It's an excellent editor, but I left it behind for Vim. I had to spend a lot of time on remote machines and I needed something with a console mode.

It's my impression that it was orphaned. Is it still under active development? I'd like it to keep going.

memorius2• 17 years ago

I use Eclipse for java and xml, falling back to jEdit (which I used exclusively for several years) for pretty much every other file type.

jEdit is great for its impressive range of language syntax highlighting support, large selection of small and useful plugins, good search/replace features, and ease of writing your own syntax highlight modes, recording macros, etc. As others have said, it has the power of emacs or vim, and everything is customizable, but it lacks any substantial barrier to entry.

It also has the advantage that you can use the same user profile on multiple platforms (e.g. linux/windows) - before I ditched my Windows machine I ran like that, rsync'ing everything to/from linux at work.

It's certainly still being developed, though activity is less than in the past. Last release was July: http://jedit.org/index.php?page=devel#schedule

I've found that the latest 4.3 releases are very stable and largely feature-complete for the purposes I use it for.

californiaguy2• 17 years ago

If you're a unix dev and want to be taken seriously, use Emacs or vim.

Otherwise people will just laugh at you behind your back. Or to your face.

shawnjgoff4• 17 years ago

Or joke about you in irc while secretly not using either tool themselves.

californiaguy2• 17 years ago

Kids these days...

j_baker• 17 years ago

Nah. You can run IRC on emacs too!

thismat3• 17 years ago

This just summed up exactly why I don't use IRC anymore.

mkeblx• 17 years ago

Notepad. It's a simple, feature-rich, light-weight editor. The learning curve is long and steep though, but well worth it. I've been using if for 3 years now and still don't know all it's bells and whistles. Best of all it comes preinstalled on a lot of OSs so you don't have to go through a laborious install process.

sammyo• 17 years ago

Not as effecient as the cat editor.

$cat > $kernelroot/drivers/custom/screen_driver.c

[note, you learn not to make any typos eventually]

iigs2• 17 years ago

You're clearly being sarcastic, but Notepad is actually pretty darn good for a lot of minor coding tasks. It would be keen if MSFT would add a few more features and disable them by default, but on balance it's usable for quite a few things.

mhansen4• 17 years ago

Urgh. I actually see people in my computer science classes use Notepad to write code... it pains me.

jdp• 17 years ago

Lately I've been using Textadept - http://caladbolg.net/luadoc/textadept2/manual/1_Introduction... - and I like it a lot. It's a lot like vi in that most menu items have a key sequence, you can split buffers, but everything is in GTK. It's also 100% extensible through Lua, the only drawback is that there aren't many themes and theming it yourself could be a little smoother.

matttah• 17 years ago

I use Kate for GUI and nano at command line.

jakecarpenter• 17 years ago

Emacs would be a great OS if only it had a good text editor...

Seriously though, isn't this like asking what kind of car is the best to drive? I like vim, nano, n++, and textmate, but the "best" for me changes as often as my mood.

cema• 17 years ago

I use a variety of editors, and it all depends on what kind of editing I am doing. Emacs is good for a lot of things, so I usually keep an instance open, but I do not always keep up with the language-specific modes, so I also use language-specific or project-specific software such as Visual Studio or Blackberry JDE (or even occasionally Netscape++) on Windows.

Emacs however has a steep learning curve. It is worth it in the long run, but I understand why many people shy away from it. Modern emacs distributions have icons and helpful toolbars and are not too intimidating, so if you think about it, give it a try.

Oh yes, and I run vi (vim or gvim) once in a while just so that I would not forget what it feels like, that's all. :-)

metachris• 17 years ago

i use bluefish a lot and like it very much: http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/

oneplusone• 17 years ago

E. Stupid name, great editor. It is like TextMate for windows.

http://www.e-texteditor.com/

yters• 17 years ago

I like writing things down with pen and paper, then running it through in my head. Once everything is perfect then i might touch a keyboard.

Manipulating things in the head is much quicker than anything else I've used.

jawngee• 17 years ago

I use floppy disks and magnets. You aren't worth the trash you produce if you can't code without a keyboard ...

boskone• 17 years ago

In the last 2-3 years emacs has just improved and improved. Like most it originally took me 2-3 distinctive efforts to "go emacs", but it pays off. Emacs is just outstanding if you are a code slinger.

If your an admin and edit a couple of config files now and again, maybe VIM, though IMHO emacs is superior for even simple editing as well.

Emacs, Emacs, Emacs.

parse_tree• 17 years ago

i program in C the most , and for that, hands down emacs is the best (I think its arguably the best period as well).

C + emacs + gdb > sex

beta• 17 years ago

Lets not forget good o'll gedit!

No but seriously, gvim all the way.

rwolf• 17 years ago

gedit didn't make the list yet? for shame!

syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, line numbers, multi-line tab, multi-line comments (with a plugin), installed whether you want it or not with ubuntu.

grandalf2• 17 years ago

gedit is a nice editor... I used it before switching to emacs... Some of the emacs modes offer a nice bit of additional power that gedit is lacking, plus gedit requires more dependency on the mouse than emacs.

but for people who are asking about textmate for linux... it's called gedit.

talleyrand• 17 years ago

I love Geany (for Linux and Windows) http://www.geany.org/

I spent a while looking for a replacement for my old favorite PSpad when I switched from windows, and this was it.

hamidp• 17 years ago

Visual Studio + viemu for vi keybindings. The sum of the two is far greater.

merrick33• 17 years ago

Coda love it, used to use textmate

joe_bleau• 17 years ago

Codewright. Very satisfied (since '01!). Too bad Borland killed it.

Ultraedit isn't bad, but it's not in quite the same class as Codewright.

icey• 17 years ago

My guilty pleasure is editpad pro on xp.

I should be using other editors, but I always end up using it whenever I'm on a windows box.

synnik• 17 years ago

Butterflies.

JimmyL• 17 years ago

Depends on what I'm doing, and in what language. For Java/Python projects, Eclipse (with appropriate plugins). For Ruby, jedit. For one-file shots, Notepad++. For live editing of remote files - which I shouldn't be doing - E or WinSCP.

Ultimately, I don't think IDEs are something for which we can determine a "best" one. We can divide them into tiers - vim is more powerful than Notepad, for example - but once you get to that top tier of functionality it's all about what you as an individual are used to and have customized to your workflow/needs.

ElbertF• 17 years ago

SciTE on both Linux and Windows. Simple and highly configurable.

wlievens• 17 years ago

Eclipse

mdoar• 17 years ago

emacs, 20 years, nothing else comes close

Ask HN: Best code editor?

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