What code editor do you use?

[jlizarraga]

Hi all,

What is your primary code editor? What is/are the major feature(s) that makes you prefer it over the other editors you've used? Also, what languages do you edit with it?

Thanks!

[Medyman]

There are a couple of threads in the Lounge forum regarding this question. You might want to search for those.

For what it's worth, I use Textmate for most of my coding.

[Twey]

My primary editor is emacs. As most people will tell you, emacs has just about any feature imaginable in an editor, and quite a few that aren't: extremists like to use it as an IRC client, news client, or calendar. The divide is whether or not this is a good thing. :) Personally the idea of using my editor to pick up emails makes me shudder, but I am considering using one of the emacs-based IRC clients. Basically, rather than being just another editor, it provides a fully-fledged cross-platform scripting environment for emacs Lisp (elisp). The editor is just the main application of this environment. Different functionality is activated by using different modes — for example, haskell-mode enables Haskell features (syntax highlighting, appropriate auto-indentation, &c.), and org-mode is a mode that facilitates taking hierarchical notes (it uses a format delimited by asterisks to treat the buffer as a tree that may be expanded/hidden and edited appropriately). The main selling point for me, though, is the integration of the bare editing features. For example, while it's possible to search for a string in most editors, it's quite clumsy to do so. emacs' incremental search is so integrated into the editing environment that it's actually practical to use it as a primary means of navigation, rather than scrolling through pages searching for things. Other handy features are dabbrev, which allows one to do language-independent abbreviation-expansion based on previous input, and indent-region, which is great for auto-formatting the stuff the newbies post. :p

[magicyte]

Notepad++. I love it all. My favorite part is the FTP_syncronize plugin. You can upload the file you're currently working on to your website in the blink of an eye ;)

[Twey]

My favorite part is the FTP_syncronize plugin. You can upload the file you're currently working on to your website in the blink of an eyeOh come on, everything has that these days :p emacs has it (obviously) and it's also built into KDE as an ioslave: you can use ftp://user:pass@host/path/to/file wherever you can use a filename in any KDE application.

[X96 Web Design]

GEdit is the best I've used - I've never had a MAC, so I don't know how the MAC editors are... I use GEdit to edit every type of plain text document (Javascript, HTML, CSS, etc.). It comes with the GNOME Desktop Environment (Linux).

[magicyte]

Oh come on, everything has that these days emacs has it (obviously) and it's also built into KDE as an ioslave: you can use ftp://user:pass@host/path/to/file wherever you can use a filename in any KDE application.

Oh well. I still LOVE Notepad++...

[Twey]

GEdit is the best I've used - I've never had a MAC, so I don't know how the MAC editors are... I use GEdit to edit every type of plain text document (Javascript, HTML, CSS, etc.). It comes with the GNOME Desktop Environment (Linux).GEdit is OK for what it is, but it's basically a notepad — it's not designed for heavy-duty editing, and it doesn't compare to serious editors like emacs or vi.

Capitalisation note: Mac is a platform developed by Apple; MAC is a hardware address associated with network cards. :)


Oh well. I still LOVE Notepad++...Obligatory amusing cartoon (http://blog.metaphox.name/somnium/blogdata/posts/img/vi-vs-emacs.png).

The editor wars may be one of the oldest debates in computing history, but for some reason I still find them interesting :p Excessively long attention span? Either way, I think everybody here should try all the editors mentioned in this post for a week or two each. It's easy to get locked into your favourite editor and avoid others because they just don't work the way you're used to, but as coders our editors do play a fairly important part in our productivity cycle. It's definitely worth experimenting.

[techno_race]

I believe her when she says she loves Notepad++ It has code highlighting, collapsificationizing, and support for 48 languages--both human and programming. Not to mention the ability to make a CUSTOM language.

[Twey]

It has code highlighting,... like everything else... even GEdit has syntax highlighting!

collapsificationizing... like everything else... (nice word :D)

and support for 48 languagesSo, I took this as a challenge. I went into emacs and did "C-h a mode" (help, apropos, "mode") to get a long list of all the modes it supported. There were a few false positives in there (describe-minor-mode), but on the whole it was a big list of modes. I got down to 160 before I got bored. That took me to html-mode. The list is in alphabetical order. :) There were 735 lines in the buffer altogether. The top three or so are used for a brief introduction, and each entry comprises two lines. I make that about 366 different modes, and of course emacs is very old and hugely popular, so there are an awful lot of new modes floating about the Internet should you desire something that isn't there — many of which can be installed in a one-click fashion through a built-in package manager.


both human and programmingAh, now that was just for programming (and browsing assorted info). I'm not quite sure how to quantify the human languages it supports, but it does by default link into both aspell and ispell, the two big dictionary applications on UNIX-like operating systems, to provide spell-checking. Additionally, emacs has a built-in IME and language-switching environment called Mule, which allows you to input text in any one of (by default) 171 different input methods and 870 different encoding systems, as well as 71 different 'language environments' combining default settings for a variety of 'languages' (quoted because it includes such things as IPA and UTF-8, as well as multiple environments for some languages).


Not to mention the ability to make a CUSTOM language.Oh, and everything I've mentioned above is fully customisable using a powerful Turing-complete programming language, EMACS Lisp (elisp).

[techno_race]

..open-source? Automatic code cleanup? Uh...uh...(checks menus) session saving? Unicode support? Line numbering? Current line highlighting? Line marking? Macros?? Uh...spell-checking (WTF!?)?

[Twey]

Yes: it's one of the classic examples of open-source apps, developed by rms himself at MIT in the '70s.
Yes: select the region you want and do M-x untabify (to replace tabs with appropriate spaces) M-x indent-region (to fix the formatting).
Yes: they're known as desktops. There's also automatic session-saving so you can recover all you were doing if the system dies.
Yes: well, there'd have to be for all the IMEs and input modes I mentioned, wouldn't there? There's support for just about every encoding under the Sun, including several Unicode-aware ones, and automatic transcoding, so you can work on a file in a completely different mode to your system and input modes without blinking.
Yes: duh.
Yes: there's a minor mode dedicated to it, called hl-line.
Yes: I'm not sure if what we mean by this is the same thing, but it's possible to set a bookmark on a line to come back to it later (and emacs does smart things with the text around it, so if the line moves or changes, your bookmark stays with it).
Yes: considering that emacs actually started out as a collection of Editor MACroS, it has very good support indeed. Macros are written in elisp, for power, but you can also auto-generate them from a sequence of actions in the editor (think Microsoft Office macros, but with a less crappy language).
Yes: covered it in the last post. :)