I admit doing this. Always.

People argue all the time what text editor is the best: VSCode, Sublime, NP++, Emacs, Nano, Vim, etc.

I just remembered when I used to do my HTML, CSS and JS in regular Windows Notepad, as a requirement in my Web Developement classes...

I think some good came from that, I picked up a habit of writing my code very neatly, easily readable.

Senior[0]: emacs is the best text editor
Senior[1]: yeah, right. It literally stands for Emacs Makes A Computer Slow.
ME: GNU loves recursive acronyms, don't they?
Senior[0]: lol
Senior[1]: lol
ME: what?
Senior[0]: he obviously made it up
Senior[0]: no, I didn't. Use vim ffs.

Looking back on 2022 from a developer's perspective, even without talking politics, war, climate, health, and injustice, despite CSS updates and AI progress, it feels like two steps forward, one step back. I used to curse ReactJS and Webpack, but we can have breaking changes everywhere else, like PHP 8 vs. WordPress. Oh yeah, and why do customers still love WordPress so much that we have to mess with this unstable abomination with its half-baked Gutenberg block editor and (full) site editing? And what about "social" media? Well, never mind, after Usenet and Myspace, why did people favour Facebook and Twitter in the first place? Thanks to devRant, there is at least one site where I rant about obscure tech topics from my subjective point of view, using swear words and exaggeration, without getting downvotes. Maybe I am even allowed to say "Mastodon" here? Thanks and merry Chanukka, Jul, X-Mas, Y-Mas, and Z-Mas and a happy new year everybody!

So I'm a new CS student diving head first into programming. I've already made my choice in terms of what language to learn and indent style (bracket gets its own line 😁), but I'm having trouble choosing between vim and emacs...

Without this devolving into a flame war, could we have a discussion on the pros and cons of each editor? I'm curious to see what other developers use and their experiences with each of these editors.

I never understood the ‚space vs tabs‘ war ...
Tabs can do everything that spaces can plus more:
* look the same as spaces, but its width is configurable (at least in a decent editor)
* the safe space (1 byte vs 3 or 4)
* you can decrease the intendation leven with one bsckspace keypress in every(!) editor.

So the winner can only be tabs? Why would I even limit myself with spaces?

I dont wanna start a flame war, just curious what you guys (especially the spaces lovers) think about it

When I was 12 I created my own LEGO manuals and monopoly boardgame variants.
When I was 14 and into gaming I had fun playing with a Q3 level editor for Wolfenstein (GtkRadiant), and drew boardgame maps.
When I was 16 I translated the game battledawn.com to French for in-game currency in return.
When I was 18 I fiddled with texture packs for Minecraft and got interested in Total War mods.
When I was 20 I met a student who studied webdev & design. I was so excited about basic HTML, CSS and later JS and PHP, that I read and learnt some every evening (and even failed an exam because I was learning PHP until 5AM)

I always wanted to use my skills to create something of use to others. Open-source is the perfect avenue for that and is also what enabled me to get here in the first place. And though I m've been professionally employed as dev since 2015, only the last 2 yrs I finally consider myself skilled enough to give back something of quality :)

I regret moving to backend. I loved the days when I used to write lines of code and refresh my browser for the changes to be displayed on the screen. I loved seeing the output of my code, the code flow, the light weight text editor, the visual satisfaction and the chrome debugger.

Now I am fucked up, I am working on creating microservices for restful api. I am hating everything about it. The fact that I should compile the entire war, manually copy them to a webapp folder, restart my tomcat and wait for 5 minutes just to see my code, and the text editors are just a pain in the ass, the debugger sucks too.

I was so looking forward to being a backend Dev because I thought Java was cool and I also was fedup with cross browser optimizations on the front end. Now I would gladly write a streaming service foe ie6. Spring has fucked me up so hard

God save me from this mess.

Ok bois it's IDE / Text Editor time again.

I have had my fair share of usage with VSCode and i have been using VIM for over a year now.

With Vim i miss intellisense, class lookups etc.

VSCode doesn't provide the macro abilities i like in VIM and also doesn't support every edge case of file (giant files for instance).

Now i am at a certain dilemma. Do i use VSCode? Vim?

I am seriously considering trying emacs, but i don't know much about it.

What is your take on this?
Please respect each others choice, i don't want another fucking IDE religion war

To the editor war guys: you can use whatever you want, but nothing in a sense of integration and comfort for developers and projectmanagers beats Microsofts Visual Studio or VisualStudioCode. If you claim otherwise you just don't know VS/VSC to their full extend. God bless IntelliSense.
Excluding Java etc. Because they got an independent Ecosystem ofc.

What's the best text editor and why is it spacemacs?

So for fear of starting a flame war which should I learn and go through the hassle of setting up for this superior workflow everyone goes on about... Vim or Emacs?
I need to configure it for dotnetcore, editorconfig, Perl, php, docker, git etc. I work across windows mac and Linux so it would be nice to have an editor that worked the same everywhere. Currently leaning more towards vim as I don’t really know much about Emacs so what’s worth investing my time in?

I want to pick up a text editor to learn.

Should I learn Vim or Emacs?

Note: I don't want there to be a war between the 2 sides. I simply want your opinion on what you think should be a good start for a college CS student like me.