What Alternative Text Editors Does DEV Use? (Not VS Code 🐱‍👓)

Hey DEV!

I'm a huge fan of VS Code, and I use it for pair programming and occasionally when I want to use one of the awesome extensions that the VS Code community has provided.

However, I'm also a fan of diverse marketplaces. I don't really like the idea that the vast majority of developers I interact with use the same text editor.

I'm the kind of person that uses Ubuntu, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. Not just because they are great tools (I think I'm having a better time on Ubuntu than the last year I spent on MacOS, honestly), but because I don't like the idea of a single company controlling a market.

For that reason, I wanted to start a conversation about alternatives to VS Code.

I use Spacemacs, which is a set of Emacs configurations that essentially combine the Emacs and Vim text editors. I really like that I don't have to do much tweaking out of the box, but I still have a lot of the power found in both Vim and Emacs.

Spacemacs 👽

What alternatives do you use? Or, if you don't what about VS Code keeps you from using something else?

Comments

[Ben Sinclair]

I prefer to see Vim as the one true editor and everything else as an "alternative".

[Benjamin Davies]

What about "Ed is the default editor"

[Ben Sinclair]

We do not talk of the Before Time.

[Charlie Martin]

Which is obviously a mistake as Emacs is the one true editor

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

Preach

[Dylan Jhaveri]

I still use vim :) with my own set of plugins managed by vim-plug.

ctrlp and nerdtree are my top two essential plugins.

I think the best way to get started with vim is the hard way, to copy settings and plugins one at a time from example vimrcs and understand each line that is going on. It takes more work, but I actually love being in full control of my editor.

I must admit, though 🙈 every once in a while I open up VSCode, usually it is only if I'm working in a large unfamiliar project. When there are lots of directories and files and I don't know the project structure, VSCode makes it a little easier for me to search and grep around.

[Jared]

I think the best way to get started with vim is the hard way

agreed.

[Mohammad Javad Ghasemy]

it's not harder than emacs

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

That's probably true, but I like to introduce people to Vim inside of VS Code with the VIM extension. It's a great way to let people get their feet wet without committing a lot of time.

[Jared]

I like that idea. It didn't work for me, though. I would fall back to what I knew and avoid using Vim motions. To me, it's like learning any language...immersion is key.

[Dawood Feyard M. Kaundama]

That's true Jared, I will also give it a try, the hard way.

[John Oerter]

I'm also a Vim user and totally agree that you have to learn it the hard way. I've tried to take shortcuts, but I've found that all the time I've invested reading the help and actually learning the ins and outs of how Vim works has been well worth it.

[Davide de Paolis]

I am spoilt and I know that it is pricey, but since I started I always worked in company that were using ( or allowed me to use) IntellijIDEA. Honestly over the years I tried Eclipse, Atom, Sublime Text, VS Code and - maybe was just me not getting the configuration and the plugins right - but i never felt so comfortable, and what's even more important - i was never so productive as when I am using Intellij.

[Varun Barad]

Finally found a Jetbrains user 🤩.
I have a background of Android development, so when I tried VS Code I just couldn't get used to it.
Since then I have been using WebStorm for web development and it hasn't failed me once.

It is true that WebStorm is much more resource intensive than VS Code but my system can handle it so I am happy with it.

[joebell1329]

I've actually found that VS Code is way more resource hungry than Webstorm. After loading up a large project I'm working on Webstorm consumes about 700MB of memory whilst the same project in VS Code consumes 1.3GB of memory.

Also, though it takes a while, when Webstorm has indexed the project it makes it very snappy to search / navigate around.

Huge fan of Webstorm to be honest. So many things just work nicely out of the box.

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

That is unexpected. Cool though!

[Varun Barad]

Agreed. Once WebStorm finishes indexing then it knocks every ball out of the park. No competitions 💪

[Sean Washington]

+1, another Intellij/Webstorm user here. I use Intellij mainly for Elixir development, and Webstorm for any JS related work.

They keyboard navigation is so good! I've tried to go back to vscode a few times and just couldn't make it stick. Once you get used to doing everything with the keyboard in Jetbrains apps it's hard to feel as comfortable in other editors.

[Sándor Károly Duba]

I started using WebStorm about 5 years ago. I love it. I also tried many other IDEs, but no one of them was such as useful as WebStorm.

[Tomislav Buljević]

Long time PHPStorm user here. I completely understand you, man. It's a great tool, and just the plugins alone are worth the money I'm paying for the tool. That's actually the only software I invest my money into.

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

I used RubyMine for a bit, but I didn't love it. I've never really been one for full-fledged IDEs though.

Do you work on really large codebases? I've heard that's the best time to use a true IDE.

[Tyler Thrailkill]

I love using RubyMine for any size project, even single scripts (using the scratch file functionality). RubyMine just does an amazing job linking together classes and allowing you to jump into documentation and source code of gems you're using. I've used RubyMine for projects ranging from single files to 10k lines of code.

[Jared]

My journey looked like a lot of web devs that have been around for like 5 years:

Dreamweaver -> Sublime Text -> Atom -> VS Code -> Vim

I'm stuck on Vim now and I doubt I'll go back.

I wrote a whole article about it if you're interested!

Article No Longer Available

[Mauro Garcia]

After reading your article a few weeks ago, I started learning vim :D

[Jared]

Awesome! Enjoy

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

Cool, thanks for sharing!

[David Mendez Guardado]

i use Vim and gVim with the same configuration

set number
set expandtab
set tabstop=4
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set autoindent
set textwidth=160
set guifont=hack\ 8
syntax on

set nocompatible
filetype off 

set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
call vundle#begin()

Plugin 'VundleVim/Vundle.vim'
Plugin 'morhetz/gruvbox'


call vundle#end()
filetype plugin indent on

colorscheme gruvbox
let g:gruvbox_contrast_dark='medium'

[Ryan Olson]

Nice! So you pretty much just use Vundle to get gruvbox? This looks similar to my config (except I just use my terminal to set colors).

filetype plugin indent on
set ttimeout
set ttimeoutlen=100
set backspace=eol,start,indent
set ruler
set autoindent
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=2
set softtabstop=2
set tabstop=2
set path=.,**
set wildmenu
set autoread
nnoremap <silent> <space> :set relativenumber!<cr>

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

This is super minimal! Do you use a file browser like nerdtree?

[David Mendez Guardado]

nop, i just like this way, i try to install the filebrowser but i fail hahah, maybe a bad configuration :(

[Jared]

Might have something to do with Vundle, I don't think it's well maintained anymore. I suggest taking a look at vim-plug

Btw, that is reaaaallly minimal lol nice 👍🏻

[Cheuk Yin Ng]

Hello fellow gruvbox user!

[Eddie]

I switch back to Atom every so often. I hide all of the nonsense menus and statuses and I find it to be cleaner than VSCode.

[abhishek sharma]

yes it is the only issue with atom is takes more time to lot the project and lot of ram other than this it can easily beat vscode

[Scott Tesler]

I don't think this is the case anymore with the new versions.

[Brett Stevenson]

It still feels like it takes a bit longer to load projects and will freeze up every once and a while when you try to open a large file, but the cleaner interface and time I've already invested in configuring it exactly how I want is what has always kept me from transitioning to VS Code.

[Scott Tesler]

Maybe try the nightly build. I've been using that and it loads extremely quickly.

[Brett Stevenson]

Cool, I'll definitely give that a try!

[Eλf Sternberg]

Emacs. I have co-workers younger than my .emacs.el file.

[Yaser Al-Najjar]

Notepad++
Simple and minimal; yet super powerful.

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

Do you use Notepad++ for more than just scripts? I've been away from Windows for some time, but I used to use it to write some small scripts and SQL. I felt it would struggle with a larger project, what has your experience been?

[Yaser Al-Najjar]

I do lots of stuff in Notepad++

• Writing articles

• Writing my daily tasks (todo list apps are time consuming, time gets wasted just playing with the UI)

• Organizing ideas (like before making a feature in an app, I write all the correlated stuff to do)

• Outlining whatever before start to write (like before sending an email, I list what should be included and what should be highlighted)

I love the idea that you can check whatever line (like a checklist) or open a new tab or switch between tabs with ctrl+tab or close it just like web browsers or auto-save any letter you write... it's just awesome!

I actually keep it open all the day, it has lightweight footprint on memory and cpu.

[lechurn]

Glad to see there's another Notepad++ fan.

[abhishek sharma]

I had some experience with notepad++ for web development but when i code php when into js framework project notepad++ just true garbage piece of software .. moved to sublime and vscode

[Darryn Dumisani Ph☻enix-92]

I love sublime as much as you love this notepad. I rely on notepads and spoken words captured at work. Tabular notes are my favourite

[Bradley Wells]

Notepad++ here as well, on Windows. Haven't found the need to switch

[Ben Lovy]

I've recently started messing with Doom Emacs. I began my Emacs journey as a Vim user with Spacemacs, then started fresh and rolled my own config from scratch, and now I want somewhere in between. It "just works" but is also closer to just regular ol' Emacs than what I got with the Spacemacs system. I'll probably stick with this for a while. Screenshot from the repo:

(and VS Code ofc)

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

I took a look at Doom Emacs when I picked up Spacemacs and it looks promising. I'm always afraid of spending too much time configuring stuff, so I've just stuck with Spacemacs!

[Ben Lovy]

Pretty much. Vanilla Emacs was fun but man was it unproductive. I don't find Doom Emacs to require significantly more tweaking than Spacemacs, YMMV.

[Adrien Giboire]

Vim.

I tried a couple of times to switch to Emacs w/ Evil because I, too, think Emacs + Vim is probably the best editor. Think is I always had issues finding the alternatives the few plugins I use in Vim. And in the end, I ended going back to Vim :)

[Benjamin Davies]

I was put off by how you needed a separate plugin for evil mode in dired

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

Vim is super nice for simplicity, but I am afraid of spending too much time in config files! That has always kept me away from using it exclusively.

[Adrien Giboire]

I did lose my self at first. But the thing to do is start fresh and see what's missing in your workflow. 99% of the time, there is something out there. It will grow with time but you don't need much at all to be productive.

I might give Spacemacs a try one day. Who knows.