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Ask HN: Best code editor?

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Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#51

Aquamacs (Emacs for Mac) http://aquamacs.org/

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#52
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.

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#53
post #37
post #5

Coda on MAC is great.

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.

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. :/

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#54
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. :-)

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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).

Voxli uses gvim on Windows and Mac, without Cygwin. I switch to Visual Studio or Xcode for debugging and compiling, and it's never been a problem. There are also some clever plugins to open a pipe to Visual Studio so you can kick off a compile directly from Vim, but I haven't needed them yet. Also we had to write some scripts to feed the proper paths to etags depending on the development environment (include Windows or Mac toolkit headers, etc).

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#57
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exa…

Reading this crystalised some thoughts I've had for a long time, but never been able to express clearly. Yes, vim is a non-discoverable interface. http://www.google.com/search?q=discoverable+interface ( Side note: from that search I found this: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch01s01.html There it lists "... concision, expressiveness, ease, transparency, and scriptability." It then expands on each, but m…

More vi/vim tips in the MOTD/fortune issued on login on some hosts (FreeBSD pops to mind).

fortune in /etc/profile is something I miss about older Unixes and Unixalikes that seems to be evolving away.

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#59
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eclipse (and intellij) are both resource hogs though.

I won't necessarily dispute this, but those "resources" on my system are there to be used. Sometimes it seems like people buy quad-core machines and 8GB of RAM, and then are angry if an app uses more than 1% of CPU and a few MB of that RAM. I'm not going to sit here and say that Eclipse's hour-long startup time doesn't annoy me, though...

The hour long startup time was what I had in mind, time is my most precious resource.

The RAM I couldn't care about, that's fairly cheap these days. I haven't a clue what that software does when it starts up but there has to be some way to optimize it.

Intellij is not much better.

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#60

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.

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

Kids these days...
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