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Editors Choice
I’ve used a few editors over time, Emacs, Atom, Sublime, Vim, VSCode, IntelliJ, Visual Studio and Xcode. From those I’ve used professionally Xcode, Emacs, Visual Studio, vim, vscode and Intellij. I have tried to use atom and sublime, but they never really stack.
Here is a small review of what I like and what I don’t for each one of them. FYI my favourite 2 are vim and vscode.
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Atom didn’t really click for me, I’ve met people that liked it, but I never managed to like it. Every time I used it felt slow and clunky. It was very famous in the circles of JavaScript developers, but too me it was still bad.
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Sublime is a very good editor and has some really neat features that a lot of expensive editors didn’t have until recently. Sublime showed to the masses what a proper editor should be able to do. So far, only Vim (and emacs could do similar things). We also need to consider that it was very easy to use compared to vim or emacs, the gui helps a lot.
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Visual Studio is considered by a lot of people a very advanced and feature rich IDE. One thing that I liked was the debugger, I have to admit it is very good. However, it is heavy and it works properly only at certain versions. I’ve used a few versions, most of which made me re-evaluate life :)
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IntelliJ is in the same group as Visual Studio, slow heavy, nicely polished features, but it has issues.
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Xcode is kind of a disappointment, it is probably the only editor for developing applications for the Apple products. The integration with Apple products was very smooth, but the tool was terrible. It crashed very often (only Visual Studio 2015 was able to crash more times than Xcode) regardless of the version, everytime it got upset it just crashed. Debugging with it wasn’t very nice compared to other IDEs. So, I never really liked it.
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GNU Emacs is powerful, but a bit slow to start, it’s easy to program since Lisp is not that hard, but it takes times to learn it and I’m not sure I want to bend my fingers in weird ways to make things work.
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vim is probably my favourite editor, it’s lightweight, it starts faster than you can imagine. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to use and not so easy to configure. To be honest I find emacs easier to configure. However, it has amazing features to manipulate text (e.g. source code). Editing text can be done in many versatile ways, some of which require a lot of mental effort, but the action is so satisfying. You can have multiple of them running and it won’t eat up all of the memory.
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Finally vscode is my second favourite editor (after vim), it’s lightweight, it has its problem (like any good MS product), it has a lot of plugins and it’s very easy to use. You can practically use it with any language you want, I’ve used it with C# and Go. Actually I still use it with C#, it’s not the best but it’s free and quite good for being free. Every now and then I have to reload the window because something happens and I cannot auto-complete or navigate to calls, but when I don’t do that it works just fine. I can run and debug what I’m working with so I’m happy.