The old classic debate between developers has been “What’s the best editor between VIM and EMACS? I think is hard to generalise and compare editors or make a statement such this is the best editor, but in this article we will give some tips that will work for every developer.
Start to think at the whole picture, especially think about your development pipeline. How do you design, document, test and share your code?
Once you have put some notes together and your workflow is outlined add your architecture and tools that you are going to use. If you need to choose between two products look for documentation and support offered, start from open source and well known products and don’t be afraid to choose a proprietary or paid product if you can see value in it.
The first editor that I used when I started programming was NANO, at the time I was very impatient of writing code without spending much time on the editor and with a more intuitive approach than VIM. On windows, the first editor that I used was Microsoft Frontpage in the late ’90 and Notepad, soon replaced after few months with SciTe (Scintilla Text Editor).
Moving forward, I’ve also used Visual Studio, Netbeans an Eclipse during my career, all good products, but I think that editors offer to a beginner enough flexibility to start and recognise value of other tools included with an IDE soon and, if needed, you will move to an IDE at the right time anyway.
The editors that we suggest to check it out are these:
And don’t forget to check out these two, it you think they are out of fashion… they’re not, start with a tutorial such vimtutor or emacs tour:
On a daily basis the editor that I used the most are Visual Studio Code for PowerShell, Sublime for Python and VIM for everything else that has no GUI.