Best Text Editors

#1

Post by tpimental » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 1:38 PM UTC

Re: Best Text Editors

#2

Post by spydez » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 4:35 PM UTC

IMO, emacs wins just for it's sheer flexibility.

Yeah, it sucks at first, but if you're a professional text wrangler, you owe it to yourself to try to master one of the big two (emacs or vim)...

I kept trying out emacs, getting scared off, trying it out again, scaring away again... But I always came back because other text editors annoyed me with their lack of ability to do exactly precisely what I wanted.

With emacs, whatever I want to do... It's just another line of lisp in .emacs. Or sometimes another package in .emacs.d and another line in .emacs...

Re: Best Text Editors

#3

Post by dkokelley » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 4:47 PM UTC

Now I'm not much of a programmer, so the answer may be obvious to some of you, but why wasn't SciTE on the list? It's lightweight and does everything I need it to. Maybe the others are just so much better than the rest.

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

Re: Best Text Editors

#4

Post by es » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 4:51 PM UTC

As for me I just love TextMate. "E" is a good alternative on Windows platform.

Re: Best Text Editors

#5

Post by j2d2 » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 5:25 PM UTC

spydez wrote: post #2

IMO, emacs wins just for it's sheer flexibility. Yeah, it sucks at first, but if you're a professional text wrangler, you owe it to yourself to try to master one of the big two (emacs or vim)... I kept trying out emacs, getting scared off, trying it out again, scaring away again... But I always came back because other text editors annoyed me with their lack of ability to do exactly precisely what I wanted. With emacs…

I don't think it sucks much at first at all... Most people I know that have a hard time with emacs don't want to learn anything fancy and think the arrow keys are fine for navigation. Let them watch you program for a few minutes and they'll be so impressed that they'll happily learn the new commands. OR, they're not cut out for technology anyway...

Re: Best Text Editors

#6

Post by aggieben » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 5:35 PM UTC

es wrote: post #4

As for me I just love TextMate. "E" is a good alternative on Windows platform.

Emacs works nicely on Windows now too, and with a decent installer.

Re: Best Text Editors

#7

Post by maxklein » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 5:58 PM UTC

What's wrong with using an IDE like eclipse or Visual Studio? That's what I do.

Re: Best Text Editors

#8

Post by truebosko » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 6:11 PM UTC

I have used pretty much all of those and then some (e, EditPlus, Komodo, etc) over several years and the best the only one I finally fell in love with was VIM.

Actually decided to use Vim cause my "e" trial expired and I have never looked back. Been using it for a few months and text editing is so fluent, easy and intuitive despite the strong learning curve. Take an hour or so each day (or every few days) and do a chapter on the 500 page Vim book.

Re: Best Text Editors

#9

Post by antidaily » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 6:13 PM UTC

dkokelley wrote: post #3

Now I'm not much of a programmer, so the answer may be obvious to some of you, but why wasn't SciTE on the list? It's lightweight and does everything I need it to. Maybe the others are just so much better than the rest. http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

I'm still using SciTE on my work PC too. I tried E, which is supposed to be like TextMate - but it was a poor immitation, imho.

Re: Best Text Editors

#10

Post by byrneseyeview » Mon, Jun 02, 2008, 6:15 PM UTC

maxklein wrote: post #7

What's wrong with using an IDE like eclipse or Visual Studio? That's what I do.

From the article: "From managing our to-do lists and writing code to jotting ideas and keeping a grocery list, nothing beats a solid plain text editor." Do you write all your text in an IDE?

And: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72774