This thread would be incomplete without mentioning ed:
Ask HN: Best code editor?
21–30 of 136 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#22scribes http://scribes.sourceforge.net/
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#23I'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.
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#24vim
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.
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#25Google 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.
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#26jedit
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#27If 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.
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#28vim
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?
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#29vim
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).
Re: Ask HN: Best code editor?
#30vim
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.
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.