(Graphical) IDE’s are great for development, but they’re slow to start and heavy to run. Sometimes you just want to take a quick look at an xml or dockerfile and you don’t want to spin up the whole IDE for that.
I’ve recently rediscovered notepad++ for that (on windows), what’s your prefered easy-acces-tekst-editor?
Helix. Instant startup. Minimal configuration required. Has all of the killer features I want from an IDE anyway.
EDIT: I assumed people would just research this anyway, but a more complete list of features I enjoy from Helix:
- very responsive
- modal editing
- declarative configuration file format (TOML, not Lua)
- language server protocol
- debug adapter protocol
- written in Rust so I am more likely to be able to submit a PR if I need to
Some cons (all known issues on github):
- no plugin API yet
- inline LSP diagnostics are overly intrusive and can overlap your code
- cold-starts the LSP when you start the editor, so you might need to wait for symbol queries in a large project
Helix deserves more love. Blazing fast, sensible defaults, good lsp support, vim-ish bindings. It’s really my perfect editor
It’s such a cool editor, but after decades of Vim motor memory I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the cursor / selection changes. I really wish there was an option to just make selection work like Vim.
You make a good case. I’ll check it out
For anyone trying it out for the first time: If you aren’t sure how to do something, it’s probably hitting the spacebar in normal mode. That will bring up a list of shortcuts, including the debugging, file chooser, and actions (for the lip)
There is also a pretty good interactive tutorial. Just run the
:tutorcommand.
Neovim for most things. At work I use VSCode for Java stuff
Sublime Text 3 perpetual license. I would move to VSCode as my “quick editor” but I’m not trusting an Electron app, for starters same document in both wastes 3x more RAM and second I can open 10GB SQL dumps in Sublime and perform find and replace operations in VSCode however…
Vim if I’m on Linux, notepad++ if I’m on windows. Though I will use VSCode in both OS if want to make a lot of changes and run the file.
My own. My Emacs config grew over years to several thousand lines, and it got to a point where I decided I could write an editor in fewer lines that it took to configure Emacs how I liked it. It’s … not for everyone. I’m happy with it, because it does exactly only the things I want it to, and nothing else, but it does also mean getting used to quirks you can’t be bothered to fix, and not getting to blame someone else when you run into a bug.
That said, writing your own editor is easier than people think, as long as you leverage libraries for whichever things you don’t have a pressing need to customize (e.g. mine is written in Ruby, and I use Rouge for syntax highlighting, and I believe Rouge is more lines of code than the editor itself thanks to all the lexers)
I wouldn’t normally point out a spelling mistake but… Why did you spell text like that?
In some languages tekst is their native word for text. OP seems to at very least know dutch, where that seems to be the case.
Lol yeah, it’s a dutchism 😆
Vim for everything
Sublime Text 2, for which I have a licence. I’d upgraded to 3 but not for a subscription model.
Neovim and Emacs
The GNOME text editor or Nano.
I appreciate Vim, but when I just need to inspect something or change a single line, the former are easier.
As for Neovim and Emacs… I don’t have eight hours to set aside monthly to keep them configured and working.
I’ve been a vim user for over a decade and I doubt I’ve spent eight hours configuring it in all that time.
Most of the configuration I’ve done in vim is to remove whatever someone else did. Like I log in as root on a server and someone put
set numberin/root/.vimrc. Like having the line number in the bottom right wasn’t enough for you, you need to waste three columns to show numbers for every line on the screen, and now I can’t copy and paste from vim without having to delete three columns from every line? NO.
Helix, Lapce, and/or VSCodium
- Sublime Text
- micro
- less + highlight/rich-cli/bat
Kate on Linux, Notepad++ on Windows.
Also, Kate on Windows (it’s really good)
Didn’t know there’s Kate for windows, nice
Emacs. But honestly, I have no idea what I am doing.
I’d call that an IDE, but also one that makes using a non-IDE editor superfluous.
As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.
The biggest irony is it’s often told by vim fanboys, who apparently don’t realize a very comprehensive emulator of vim it is one of the editors Emacs offers. But mostly it seems to be told by people who don’t even know what Emacs is, they just know they’re meant to disapprove of it.
Frankly, I’ve seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.
Yeah, I’d call Emac and Vim both IDE’s. They’re definitely not “just” text editors.
Vim can have some IDE-like qualities, if you bolt enough plugins in to it, but by default it affords buttinx text in a file and manipulating it.
I woudn’t classify it as an ide though.
Neovim can can certainly be an IDE, but its complexity comes from having a lot of features to rapidly edit text. d5d deletes 5 lines, vwwy selects two words and yanks them, gg returns to the beginning of the file, etc. It’ll maybe do some code highlighting out of the box but its featureset is about never needing to touch a mouse or leave home row.
It’s about like notepad++ on Windows in that it’s very good for quick edits of a file or otherwise manipulating plaintext but it isn’t good out of the box for actual writing meant to be read by other human beings.
This is going to be a boring answer but I use neovim. I do use it as my ide as well but it’s so fast and lightweight that when I need to edit a random config file or something, I just start another instance of it.
