There have been polls and questions about which editors one should use or which one would be best for a certain programming task.
But I'm wondering which editor(s) you really use and why. So I want to hear your personal experiences and caveats, the positives and the negatives. I've been using a lot of editors throughout the years, from HotDog to Dreamweaver to Editplus to Notepad++ to bigger IDEs like Eclipse, but below are the ones that I use at the moment, both for work and for personal coding.
So I'll start small :)
Positives
Negatives
Just have been using this editor for a couple of days
Positives
Negatives
So for now Atom wins for me, but I don't know how both handle other parts like GIT integration or function/class/method/variable finding across different files.
I'm a lightweight user in that sense. ;)
Anyway, let me and other developers know which editor(s) you use, maybe we'll learn of an unknown gem ;)
I switched from Sublime Text 3 to Atom recently. At the moment, Atom has exactly the same (and more) feature or plugins you can find for Sublime. There are no particular issues in passing from one to the other, so there are just 2 things to take into consideration:
ST3 is written in C++, so his main advantage is the speed and there's no comparison with Atom. Anyway the development of ST3 is almost stuck and most plugin developers and github users are moving on Atom. Moreover, Atom is moving forward faster in development: it is open source and the community is growing day after day, while ST3 is a closed single person stuff. These are primary importance things, which will make Atom far superior to ST3 and other editors in the near future.
I have no doubt, if the speed is not an issue, Atom is the best choice right now.
atom. it gets better almost every week. and its package manager works behind corporate proxy while sublime fails hard here at least behind our proxy.
Well I've tried Brackets, Sublime, Atom and Eclipse in my collage days. Also at my work they use PHPStorm a lot. From the first three I'm way more comfortable with Sublime cause others lacked personalization and don't have the support for Stylus which Sublime has. On the other Hand Atom behaved a little weird on Windows and had a lot of errors and pretty much everytime I wanted to use it I had to install it again.
Eclipse is a really good tool for Java but is really heavy on performance and HD space. And I was going to use PHPStorm but what turned me off was the fact that it needs Java, like Eclipse, to run (JDK) and I couldn't use for free. The last part that really turned me off (but a positive side of PHPStorm) was that it has great integration with Git and shows where you have conflicts.
So for me Sublime Text is the ultimate winner specially because of lightweight, speed and specially the portable versions. You don't even need to install it for using it which helped a lot in my college days and when you are on vacations and need to work you can get into any computer and you're good to go without having to be the admin. The bad part and the one I really hate is the free license popup - that annoying alert for buying a license but it ends when you buy it.
I've tried several editors/IDEs - Sublime Text 2/3, Brackets, Notepad++(don't ask), Atom, Komodo IDE, but currently my main editor is Jetbrains WebStorm. It's all you can ask from a JavaScript/Front-End Development IDE, even a little more:
That taken, there are some cons though - it's somehow ugly, compared to other editors, it's a paid product, but there are is a discount for startups(50% off) and even more - it's free if you are a student or an Open Source contributor. Another thing worth mentioning is that sometimes Webstorm can become slow and clunky.
For some quick edits I'm using Sublime Text, because well.... it's super fast!
P.S* For some time now I've been messing with Visual Studio Code and it's great so far. Some of the features - fast, git integration, fast, refactoring, fast, debugging, fast, great language support, fast, one of the best autocompletes, autosave, build in task runners, user customization. The only thing I'm missing is plugins, although they will be implementing them soon™ . Oh, did I mention how blazing fast it is! :)
P.S** At home I'm using Atom, with lot's of packages. Atom was reeeeeeally slow before (couldn't even handle files larger than 2MB), but now (v1.0.19) is greatly improved, both stability and speed. For customization and extendability - no other editor can provide such level as Atom. I have some troubles with freezes from time to time, which really bothers me a lot (it's most likely an extension memory leakage), but no other complains so far.
P.S*** I feel like an editor whore now...
IntelliJ ultimate, it has support for everything I use, Java, Scala, Dart, Python, PHP, perl, C/C++, Dockerfiles, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Spring, ROO, AspectJ, Hibernate, BPMN, AppEngine, Yaml, Angular, .... and the list goes on.
With full support for Git as well as Github functionality, SVN for when I still need to fall back to old SVN repos and also mercurial for the odd case where I still need to checkout code from Google Code.
Awesome push-in refactoring which other IDEs simply suck at.
Probably the best hints you can get in an IDE suggesting better ways to do stuff, for example, doing something in a Java7 way, but you're compiling for Java8, it'll make suggestions suggesting stuff like you can rewrite this using the following Lambda expression, Ctrl+Space and it refactors your code for you, Alt+Space on a variable and it can generate constructors, getters, setters, etc for you. It'll analyse your code for you ... this variable might not have been initialised, this code is obsolete and will never be reached do to the conditions ... etc.
Probably the best merge tool I've seen so far compared to Netbeans, Eclipse, straight command line and SmartGit (SmartGit probably in a close second place), merging is a pain, with IntelliJ ultimate, you get a screen split into three well marked as your code, resulting code and incoming code with single click moving snippets in and out of the result as well as the option to edit the resulting code in the merge view. Managing multiple branches is also easy.
It also has VIM built in which you can just activate and it's the best VIM plugin I've seen in any IDE.
It's fast, autocomplete is instant unlike Netbeans / Eclipse which has lag when autocompleting on large projects and eclipse sometimes simply crashing. IntelliJ Ultimates actually pops a dialog if you run low on memory asking you if you want to assign more memory to the IDE, every other IDE I've worked with simply crashes into oblivion.
The only CON is probably the expensive price-tag, but if you're writing code 16 hours a day, then not having to fight with your IDE is well worth the money.
I use Sublime too, but the version 3.
What i really like about it is
Negative aspects in my opinion are :
Other editors I have tested are eclipse (which is very slow in my opinion), atom (didn't have a german keyboard support), vim (i use it mostly when i work in consoles), adobe dreamweaver and brackets (both tools i wouldn't recommend...) and text editors like notepad++
I would choose sublime again if i had to choose.
I have been using sublime for quite a while now, it suits my requirements. Like you said it's highly customizable for e.g. I use a package that enables React.js syntax. I also tried using Atom, couple of months ago, but I found it to be slow maybe they have improved it now.
I have seen lot of people using Webstorm IDE as well. Its a good choice if you are a JS developer and need the support that a text editor doesn't provide.
Raphael Isidro
Wake me when you need me
Raul Arturo Medina Nussbaum
I use Sublime Text 3, because is small, fast and packed with plugins. I 90% of the time work with javascript/node, so this editor is great. My second choice is Intelli J Idea, for java programming, is a VERY powerful tool, with lots of plugins, shortcuts, helpers, etc. You've to buy a license, but if you do Java (or advanced PHP), it worth the money.