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Ask HN: Best code editor?

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Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#121

Post by JunkDNA »

camflan wrote: post #3

vim

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#122

Post by jamesbritt »

mdasen wrote: post #23

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 support…

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. :)

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#124

Post by vicaya »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #48
mrshoe wrote: 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…

Actually, I found vim quite discoverable, you can pretty much type :help on anything and you'll see ton of stuff around that are interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#127

Post by chaboutime »

memorius wrote: post #115
andrewl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I've been using jEdit for years now for all non .NET dev which I use Visual Studio due to code insight mainly (who can remember all the library stuff!).

jEdit is great, it works on both Windows and Linux with no visual quirks, you easily make up your own syntax for custom languages, it has a console, a file system and a project viewer plugin.

Also it has subpixel sampling for fonts which keeps my eyes not falling off the sockets after long time hacking. Finally a feature that I have not found in other editors in the custom folding modes (like the region thing in VS) which makes it easy to understand the structure of long files.

The only negative issue that I 've noticed so far is the missing character substitution for foreign languages due to the Java thing. For example if you use a monospace font other than courier new and your code/resources contains multiple languages, english, greek, japanese etc you get squary blocks all over the place. All native Windows and Linux apps do automatic font substitution!

Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?

#130

Post by thismat »

davepeck wrote: post #62
barredo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

That's the thing that really depresses me about TextMate, I use it and like it a lot, but it's starting to feel old and could really use a fresh coat of paint and some new pictures on the wall.
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