Desktop Code/Text Editor of Choice

what is paper?

3 Likes

It is a primitive output format preferred by brain-damaged MBA’s and management. eg Print your timesheet and we may deign to review it and start processing your payroll…

1 Like

See also stone tablets, clay tablets (not those new electronic ones…) , papyrus.

Hope that helps! :wink:

1 Like

Another vote for Atom. A few additional thoughts:

  • Atom does syntax highlighting for Go’s HTML, which is useful for Hugo development.
  • Another nice feature is adding a directory as a project folder. I did this with my site’s directory and now I can quickly search and open files with Ctrl-P.
  • Atom has a built-in Markdown preview, which is sometimes useful.
  • I like the multi-cursor. It’s better than the one in Notepad++ and on par with Sublime Text’s.
  • I agree with you, @gaetawoo: it’s not really a quick open-edit-close editor. It takes several seconds to open, even on my nimble SSD. I use it more as a quasi-IDE, and prefer other editors (Notepad++, Mousepad, nano) for quick edits.
  • Although its performance has greatly improved since its initial release, it’s still not as snappy as some other editors, especially if you’ve got a lot of plugins running. I find performance also depends on display resolution; my machine running a UHD display has more trouble with it then my ThinkPad with its dinky 1366 x 768 screen. But again, performance has greatly improved. The problems I had a year ago are now basically gone.

But as a simple upgrade from Notepad++, I agree that there’s not much out there.

1 Like

I use vim (mostly the neovim variant).

The Hugo syntax highlighting is very nice on Atom, that’s for sure, I really wish it was simple to convert that plugin from Atom to VSCode. There are so many good VSCode plugins though and so much interest and progress in its development that it’s only going to get better. Same with Atom I’m sure but in some cases, I feel VSCode is already ahead.

1 Like

I subscribe wholly to what Paul Irish called an “onion editor” at Fluent Conf 2012. What he meant by that was any editor which is easy to get started with and, as you, ahem, peel back the layers, you become a better, more proficient developer.

Both Sublime and Atom are examples of these types of editors. I personally used Sublime for several years before ditching it for Atom. YMMV. Try both. Try all of them. But avoid IDEs if you can lest ye get locked into a single non-portable tool.

Reading this changed everything for me:

What do you mean by portable? An editor that is mutli-platform? or one that you can move your data to and from with relative ease?

  • Gedit for scratchpad, casually viewing files (GNOME user, so default)
  • Atom for a few projects, and processing my news pile
  • (neo)vim for everything else

I started using vim a few weeks ago because I was stressed and wanted to distract myself. I went too far into the rabbit hole and now swear but it. Of course I also use mutt, cmus, khal, khard and newsbeuter, so it makes sense for me.

I’d love to have learned org-mode, but I never grokked it. vim is my kind of editor for “prose” and “code” (as the kids say these days). :slight_smile:

I stopped reading when I hit the line “Any tool that does not allow me to develop live in production is slowing me down”. Those are precisely the developers I most want to slow down, because I’m the one who has to clean up the mess at 2am on a holiday weekend. Like the guy who took down half a million set-top boxes by commenting out a line in an XML file.

Perhaps best summed up by a conversation I heard outside our server room in the early Nineties:

“What’s taking them so long? We’ve got work to do! Dammit, if I could get in there, I’d fix it myself!”

“I’m pretty sure that’s why you can’t get in there.”

-j

The bigger takeaway from the article is to make your toolset your own, and be rabid about it. Which is sounds like you are. But if it were my shop I’d simply give everyone all access and tell them if they botch it they’re fired. Guaranteed no one will ever make a mistake they can’t live with.

I’d like to visit your world someday. I bet the streets taste like ice cream. :slight_smile:

-j

Heh. If I were to step onto the street right now it’d taste a lot like rock and cow dung, just the way good roads should taste. :wink: