Still searching for a good Code-Editor?

Hello, ive been here for a while and i often see questions about "Shall I take an IDE or an Editor?" or "Which editor is the best" and so forth.

I'm going to give you a general advice in these terms, Trying to answer these questions for you:

1. Are you a professional programmer?
2. Do you have fun while tinkering on code?
3. Which Operating System do you use for programming?
4. How much money do you want to spend for an editor?
5. Which language you want to program in?

Q1: If you work every day with code and maybe make money with it, you should think about a real IDE. This is a massive program which gives you some advantages to things, you probably did manually all day long. Most IDE's have features to upload your code to your website or to github (tortoise .. whatever.). They have features to execute your code inside the program without any need of an external Terminal or runtime environment. Etc.. lots of features you will miss, if code is your daily work.. But it is too much stuff for beginners and guys, that learn a new programming language.

Q2: If you have fun with the tinkering inside the code to reach a new level of productivity or maybe a new "own style", you definitly need something with code-highlighting. The number of Editors out there is VERY big, to select the right one, ensure that you know your preferred features. Code-highlighting is one of the most handy features that you want to have. It allows you to see errors quickly (because the line of code changes the color) and it gives the code a nicer look at all.

Q3: On Apple, Linux or Windows there are much offers from different companies that say: "Our Editor is the very best". But often you can't use the same editor in other operating systems. Sometimes the operating system brings a very good editor by default... in Windows you have something that is called "notepad" ("Editor" in some german windows systems). On an apple system you'll find something like "textedit" and on linux you have "mate (kate, pluma, gedit .. depends on your distribution and desktop environment). But they differ much in their quality. Windows Notepad is not nearly as usefull as gEdit, and "kate" is not really better then "Mate". Depending on what OS you use, you should consider if you would get any advantge from installing a new editor, maybe you have all you need already on your system.

Q4: Rock solid question: Do you want to spend Money for a professional Editor (like "Sublime Text"), or even more money for a professional IDE (like RubyMine, "CLion" or "IntelliJ IDEA")? Can you afford the cost and see the use of one of these tools? At least as long as you are learning to write code?

Q5: Some lanuages work better on different OS's. As often Ruby is seen on Linux/MacOs, the less you see it on Windows. And you wont see .NET Framework programs on Linux very often. Your choice of the IDE or editor should be well considered and connected to the language you use. There is no advantage by starting to develope a .NET application with Pluma on Arch Linux. Sometimes the language should match the Operating system, and the used editor/ide as well.

If you find the answers to all of these questions, you should be able to find your way. Asking around what other guys use, will not often bring you to a point where you want to be. Some use VI (later: VIM) which is a terminal based editor for professional users. If you just start to learn how to programm, this will throw you back to the stoneage, but its efficient and fast. Others use Eclipse, its an free IDE for almost all languages, on almost every Operating system, but its big and can be complicated to config for your demands. And so forth.. you can just find your text editor by knowing exactly what you want, and what you need, not by the opinion from other guys that you don't know.

I always recommend "Atom" as main code editor. its very powerful, It's free (open source under MIT licence), it's almost like sublime text (with lots of advantages) and available for Linux, Mac and Windows. But that is just ONE opinion of one in a million.

Find your own "Home 'suite' home".

BS