What's your favorite text editor/IDE?

[atgm]

I would have said Notepad++ until I found Sublime Text 2 (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-new-...) here on HN. A big shout-out to you guys. I completely intend to buy a license when it comes out of Alpha.

[giu]

I actually bought a license after using the editor for quite some time. It's the first time I spent money on a text editor, despite having the possibility to chose from a number of free alternatives. For me, this money is really spent well for various reasons, the most prominent ones being that the software makes me happy and I really enjoy working with it.

I'm currently using version 2, too, and the developer is pushing updates on a weekly base (http://www.sublimetext.com/2). I even requested a change in the forums once; the developer kindly responded to my thread, and shipped my requested change with the new version.

Awesome work, seriously!

[rexf]

I'm using Sublime Text as well. I figure it has a lot of tools built in that I'm not taking advantage of since I don't know about them.

Something like this for Sublime Text would be great: http://www.zeldman.com/2010/08/13/how-to-use-textmate/

[BerislavLopac]

I have started using Sublime a while back, but was recently thrown off by its lack of printing support... But generally my absolute favourite is Komodo -- I'm using IDE, but Edit is good enough for most tasks.

[robryan]

Yeah I use this fulltime now, at least on the PC, running textmate on my laptop, just been a bit lazy to change over.

[rmccue]

Ditto here, it's absolutely fantastic using a well-designed interface (unlike N++, which seems sporadic at best).

[bigiain]

The greybeards all say "unix is an ide".

I think I first heard that from Tom Christiansen when he was heavily involved in the Perl community back in the mid '90s.

Even today, some of the most productive programmers I know only use X/Gnome/KDE(/OSX) as a means of organising terminals on modern hardware.

[dexen]

Unix was taken one step further with Plan 9. On P9, the two common editors are Sam [1] and Acme [2]. While not IDEs per se, Acme yields very well to scripting. A bunch of scripts tailored to the current project really makes my day.

Acme has that neat feature of interpreting text as potential hypertext -- each of several addressing formats [3], when clicked, opens indicated file or resource, at the indicated point. Click on compiler error message and you get there. Prepare a command, click on it and you execute it. Etc., etc.

Also, unlike the mainstream IDEs and editors, those two work surprisingly well over network.

----

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

[3] implemented via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumber_(program)

[beza1e1]

Unix is a "DE", without the "I". This is a good thing. The "I" would mean that the parts would not be reusable in other contexts. While you can use "sed" for many things, you cannot do that with Eclipse's search-and-replace dialog.

[jasonkester]

That's probably because they're mistaken as to what an IDE is.

In my mind, if it's not background compiling your code as you type, it's not an IDE in the modern sense.

[zengr]

You can take a look at the Spreadsheet here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An4bm34gQOpddHhwMm9...

And you are most welcome to "mine" it too (please share the results) ;)

[goo]

Watching the live results is very entertaining. It's also the first time I've cared about the built-in chatroom on google docs.

[davidw]

It looks like setting 'VIM' as the default has made it quite popular.

[cagey]

My own (call it "c").

At university (1985-9, EE major), there was (MS-/PC-)DOS (CP/M had faded into oblivion). Unix was something heard of but not seen. There was no internet (for starving students). The only sanely priced own-it-yourself computing platform was IBM-PC (clone). I bought a used Sanyo MBC-775. I scrimped to afford the Borland and MS C compilers w/student discount. The Borland IDE was nice, but the MS compiler seemed qualitatively better. And the MSC package had this powerful text editor M. It had almost no UI, but with its "reverse polish" command syntax, box, stream and line selection modes with commands accepting all arg types, I found it tremendously intuitive, Completely customizable key assignments. A macro language. Unlimited undo/redo. It could edit files > 640K (Borland's could not). The manual was well done for those days, and included an API and build process for "editor extensions" (basically DLL's before there were DLL's), which I was soon writing. I was hooked. My brain-finger editor mapping was soon cast for life. Shortly MS replaced M with PWB, which I tried but discarded (bloatware), sticking with M. Years pass, during which I wrote a M clone, now a Win32 console app. Which I use today. While I'm fond of unix (use it for servers at home), all of my employers have been Microsoft-only shops, so my investment in developing my own text editor, which I can change as my needs require, has been worthwhile. Editor vendors in this market have come and gone (Brief, Codewright to name a few of the more popular), and their users have been disrupted. I just "keep on truckin" with my own... If the need arises, maybe I'll port to Linux/BSD.

[schultzi]

The lack of PHP on that list makes me feel dirty for writing it in.

[cborodescu]

Zend Studio is the best there is when writing PHP code. I wouldn't use Notepad++ or any other editor instead :) Of course ZDE does so much more: http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/

[zengr]

My apologies. I missed it out by mistake and cannot make changes to the spreadsheet now.

[atgm]

Me, too.

[xyzzyz]

Emacs is more an IDE than text editor, though it may not look like one at the first glance. Maybe if it had more windows opened by default...

[calibraxis]

Yeah, I think there's a spectrum of emacs use, between text editor and IDE (or OS). For a while, I just used it as a handy text editor, and I wouldn't say emacs was an IDE for me then. Now I:

  - installed autocomplete (with drop-down lists and tooltips)
  - org-mode is the first daily planner to impact my life 
  - run lint by hitting a button, linked to sourcecode lines
  - use REPLs
  - integrate different features naturally (like hyperlinks between my
    day-planner and sourcecode or a webpage; or hitting a button to
    clear/reset a bash terminal and restart the program in it)

Haven't gotten around to using emacs for email though... When I do, things like org-mode will become even more powerful.

[mattdeboard]

Emacs is more an OS than an IDE.

[mgrouchy]

I'm a Vim guy, been using Vim for the better part of the last 8 years, kept trying other stuff and ended up back at Vim every time. Figure I will just stick with it this time :)

[albertzeyer]

Xcode is also quite handy as a simple text editor. I have linked all my txt/py/sh/js files to be opened with Xcode. For most languages it has some syntax highlighting support and it always has some semi intelligent autocompletion.

[dchest]

If only it didn't launch in half an hour.

[xutopia]

I'm always using Textmate but I envy those who were able to suffer through the pain of the vim learning curve.

[beza1e1]

Favourite language "C but not C++" is not available. However, i see that it does not make sense to distuingish between them, when we are talking about IDEs.

[btipling]

In the context of "what is your favorite language?", I think it makes a lot of sense to separate them. I can put a checkmark on C but I can not put one for C++.

[zengr]

Agree. When it comes to IDE/Editors, I don't think we need to write C and C++ separately.

[btipling]

C/C++ ? Really? Have you met many engineers who write a lot of C and who also love C++ or vice versa because I sure haven't. I decided not to complete the form after seeing 'C/C++'. Also, this is a flag if it's on a resume that the person may not really know either language.

[wladimir]

Or someone that puts it on his resume could know both languages in depth, but wants to save space. There are many ways of discovering whether someone has proficiency in languages, but this sounds like a really crappy indicator.

[zengr]

From a perspective of IDE/editor selection, does this matter?

[johncoltrane]

Surprisingly nice layout.

I've started with DreamWeaver in 98 or so. Around 2000 I started to jump from one editor/IDE to the other until I settled with TextMate in 2006 or 2007. 5 months ago I commited to attack Vim's legendary learning curve. Now I'm almost as productive as I was with TextMate and I LOVE Vim.

Lately I've dutifuly downloaded and tested the latest "advanced editors" for Mac (Coda and Espresso) and found them totally useless: less useful features than TextMate (which they aim to replace thanks to the delay of TM2), too much focus on style… Pouah!

[tehjones]

Why combine c and c++ together. If you are using mostly C with some C++, you are really using C++. If you are using C++, well you are using C++.

[TamDenholm]

Love gedit personally. Does all the basics that i need without a load of crap that i dont want. For those that want the crap there are plugins.

[wladimir]

I agree that gedit is a very nice and light editor for code.

The only feature I really miss in gedit is "Replace in selection". I use this many times in refactoring code. There have been many requests for it but the developers are refusing to add this basic feature.

[paganel]

I like it that there are at least 2 other programmers out-there using Python's IDLE. All this time I thought I was the only one using it :)

[mattdeboard]

As a former IDLE user, I highly, highly recommend you take a week or two and commit to learning emacs or vim (I recommend emacs...). It can be daunting but once you get used to it you'll wonder how the hell you ever accomplished anything in IDLE.

(If you decide to take the plunge with emacs, hit me up via email [it's in my profile] and I'll send you a link to my config file.)

[gaius]

ActivePython is surely most often edited in Komodo? They are both ActiveState products.

[briancurtin]

He may mean PythonWin, which is a part of the pywin32 package, which ActiveState has distributed for quite a long time.

[kbd]

I've been using Komodo Edit for a while. It has a few quirks/issues but overall I think it's the best editor that's not Emacs/Vim. I'm keeping an eye on Sublime Text 2 though.

As for the link: some terrible choices. ActivePython is an IDE?

[protomyth]

I kinda miss PFE on windows. I've been looking for something on OS X that would let me create macros and templates as easily. It didn't really have many features but it was a good workhorse.

[aufreak3]

Damn! Can't type ω with option-03C9 even with the unicode hex input turned on in macosx! Hope CΩ satisfies them :)

[jerguismi]

Why not to share results instantly?

[whalesalad]

I'm guessing this just goes into a spreadsheet, and at the end of the survey the results will be parsed into some kind of blog post.