Gunnar Kudrjavets

Paranoia is a virtue

My text editor is better than yours ;-)

The subject of text editors is the most controversial theme I ever touched in my blog. Just for a fun I took a quick look around to see what developers/testers in my team use. No big surprises, lots of different editors:

  • Emacs
  • Epsilon Programmer’s Editor
  • Source Insight
  • gVim
  • Visual SlickEdit
  • Visual Studio

What I personally use? It depends on the situation. Mainly the following three editors:

  • Visual Studio - for writing the non-trivial amounts code, I love IntelliSense and integrated help, I’ve learned already too much shortcut keys and I’m too lazy to re-learn all this in some new editor to achieve the similar level of productivity.
  • Source Insight - this is IMHO very good tool for browsing and understanding the large code bases or quickly finding out where something is defined and how. For example I have one project which consists of all ATL, CRT, MFC, and Platform SDK header files. You won’t believe how useful reading the header files is ;-)
  • gVim - I use it for everything else programming related, editing files quickly, writing some snippets of code etc.

I’ve been considering switching to Emacs or XEmacs (hopefully this will force me to learn Lisp also) to feel more like a “real geek“ ;-), but there’s never enough time to spend a couple of days to reach average efficiency.

Posted: Apr 16 2004, 10:00 AM by gunnarku | with 20 comment(s)
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Comments

Scott Galloway said:

My question is, why doesn't Visual Studio meet all of these needs- for instance, VS.NET is pretty nasty to use for classic ASP (you need to change settings, debug parameters, no template support etc). Surely if you have to use Emacs / Visual Slickedit it means that Visual Studio .NET has a problem?
# April 16, 2004 1:25 PM

Anonymous Coward said:

What about Notepad?
# April 16, 2004 1:30 PM

Gunnar Kudrjavets [MSFT] said:

Scott,

I don’t have a good answer for this, somebody from Visual Studio team will be definitely a better person to explain the reasons behind all the trade-offs they made, but here’s my personal theory:

1) The main reason I for example use gVim is that I learnt vi in 1994 when I got my first Linux account and once you learn to use something efficiently then usually there has to be pretty big benefit to move entirely to another tool.

2) Every tool / environment which is designed to be universal (be appeasable for the most of the developers) means that there’ll be always some set of people who’ll better tools to do the specific tasks efficiently. For example if I need to edit three lines in some makefile I don’t want to start up an entire development environment. At the same Visual Studio IMHO rocks when I need to write some piece of code using .NET Framework and do the Foo.Bar.Baz(…) where Baz has five different signatures.
# April 16, 2004 1:35 PM

Gunnar Kudrjavets [MSFT] said:

Actually I've been using Notepad as a conversion tool to save files quickly in different formats like Unicode, ANSI, UTF-8, or big-endian Unicode ;-)

Here’s the quote from Notepad documentation: “Notepad is a basic text editor that you can use to create simple documents.” Every tool has its purpose, so does Notepad.
# April 16, 2004 1:43 PM

Luc Cluitmans said:

Bitter holy wars have been fought over editors. But if I may add my 2 eurocent's worth:

Other than the VS2003 editor, the editor I use a lot is the freeware editor ConTEXT ( http://www.fixedsys.com/context/ ). [And no, I'm not involved with it, I'm just a happy user.] It has a few features that are missing from the VS editor:

- It starts almost instantaneously :)
- It is free.
- It has easily customizable highlighting, writing your own highlighter for your own language is easy (if it fits the constraints).
- You want to copy your nicely syntax-highlighted code in a web page or in a Word document? Just select it and select 'export' from the file menu to export it to HTML or RTF...
- It implements block selection correctly (funny that shaykat just mentioned it in his blog http://blogs.msdn.com/shaykatc/archive/2004/04/16/114691.aspx ) - Unlike VS, pasting a selected block leaves the cursor straight *below* the block, which makes repeatedly pasting a short block very useful.


# April 16, 2004 2:09 PM

Josh Williams [MS] said:

No one should have to use notepad. Personally I'm a fan of emeditor (http://www.emeditor.com) as a minimal text editor and notepad replacement. For real work Source Insight all the way. I admit to missing intellisense now and again, but I've gotten over it.
# April 16, 2004 2:09 PM

RohanD said:

What about UltraEdit (<a href="http://www.ultraedit.com"></a>)? It is extremely fast and very feature-rich.
# April 16, 2004 2:23 PM

Scott said:

I paid $20 for EditPlus (http://www.editplus.com) about 5 years ago, then I lost my registration code and bought it a second time. I always refer to it as "so good I bought it twice." It's great for text/source editing. Supports syntax highlighting and allows you to define custom commands you can run within it. So I'm able to call NAnt and build my app from within it.

Why not use Visual Studio? Well I do for class library type projects where the intellisense helps out. But for ASP/C/MX editing I use EditPlus or gVim. The Visual Studio designer just mucks things up too often.
# April 16, 2004 2:29 PM

Matt Warren said:

Emacs? Emacs!!! OMFG! Will the insanity ever end? That's not an editor, that kludge of megalithic proportions! If you don't believe me just ^n down to the next line and read it again.

OMFG!
# April 16, 2004 3:58 PM

Roger Heim said:

I use TextPad for non-VS work. I maintain a couple of old legacy DOS apps and it's perfect for that. I even get syntax coloring (after I fed it a syntax definition file). No Intellisense-like capabilities, though.
# April 16, 2004 4:14 PM

B.Y. said:

Give me a hex editor any day. Debug.com is pretty good too.
# April 16, 2004 4:25 PM

kent tegels said:

TextPad. No, seriously, check it out.
# April 16, 2004 5:59 PM

Gunnar Kudrjavets [MSFT] said:

After reading all these comments I'm delighted to see that I succeeded to cause some emotions. The bad side of being a non-native speaker is that I had to go to http://www.acronymfinder.com/ to find out what OMFG means ;-)
# April 16, 2004 6:03 PM

Gabe Anguiano said:

I have another vote for UltraEdit, its the only editor I've used that can edit 100mb+ text files (with a small memory footprint) plus it has syntax highlighting, macros and regular expression support.

# April 16, 2004 6:33 PM

Dennis Cheung said:

No one mentioned BBEdit!! BBEdit is clearly the best text editor in the world.

Uh... if you're using a Mac that is.
# April 18, 2004 1:12 AM

David Pickett said:

Source Insight for any serious C++ work. Boxer, Win32Pad, and Notepad in various combinations for miscellaneous text editing. Currently trying out EmEditor, which is winning me over for text editing due to A) being immensely fast to start up, B) capable of reading/saving in a jillion encodings, and C) fairly easy to use for various text-y kind of things. Also, when you need it, you really need it: SC Unipad is the ne plus ultra Unicode text editor. Doesn't have all the features or the frosting, but by golly it will slice, dice, and saute your Unicode like nothing else.
# April 19, 2004 3:27 AM

Ron said:

I guess I'll have to be the lone EditPadPro (http://www.editpadpro.com) user. :)
# April 19, 2004 10:26 AM

Eric Gibson said:

There is nothing wrong with the Visual Studio editor. I can't use anything but vi (or gvim)... I tried to use the editor in visualstudio, but I end with a bunch of jjjkkllll's in my code and it takes twice as long, so I just stopped. It's too ingrained... I think the neural pathways in my brain are etched for vi after working/coding/emailing/everything in a unix environment for years and years.
# May 13, 2004 6:36 PM

Andrew Bolkonski said:

EmEditor rocks!
# July 1, 2004 12:57 PM

Oriflame, Praca, Zarabiaj said:

Well i do use EditPlus but always i try to replace some parts of code in more then 500 files, after several operations it just crashes!!! That drives me crazy!
# July 6, 2004 12:50 PM
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