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General Discussion

Posted by Gavin Johnston
Gavin Johnston
9,107 Points

Whats your go-to text editor?

So I started off using Sublime to learn with, its simple interface is appealing, but my biggest like is Sublime's keyboard shortcuts, it all feels very natural and makes navigation painless while I focus on the code.

Now that I am progressing in my learning I can see that Sublime probably isnt the best for larger projects and ive been trying to incorporate VScode into my work and the interface is cool but i find it so much harder to navigate and use keyboard shortcuts, its really slowing down my coding.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Or have different preferences?

1 Answer

Peter Vann
Peter Vann
36,425 Points
Peter Vann
Peter Vann
36,425 Points

Hi Gavin!

My go-to code editor is VSCode. Once you get some finesse with it, you will likely agree. It's powerful and its Git integration is hard to beat. Get savvy with the shortcuts and make sure you have all the necessary/handy extensions installed and you will come to LOVE IT!

Don't get me wrong, though. I also use Atom, Sublime, and Brackets - sometimes I just like how certain files display in the different environments, especially if I'm juggling several projects at once and want to keep them all open at the same and need to keep them differentiated in my own head.

These may help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPqXP_kLzpo

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/tips-and-tricks

https://jsmanifest.com/21-vscode-shortcuts-to-code-faster-and-funner/

https://hackernoon.com/12-visual-studio-code-shortcuts-for-faster-coding-ts3a3yvg

https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-use-vscode-like-a-pro-e120c428f45f

https://x-team.com/blog/best-vscode-extensions/

https://blog.bitsrc.io/16-unique-vscode-extensions-every-developer-should-have-in-2020-c4dcdb74506a

https://blog.bitsrc.io/top-10-visual-studio-extensions-in-2020-857ea6d692dd

By the way, if you work on a mac, I recommend installing Dash:

https://kapeli.com/dash

It's a text expander (and online tech document repository). With a text expander, you can associate frequently reused code snippets and/or long blocks of text with short aliases/abbreviations (VSCode has some similar snippets features, but dash works ANYWHERE on your system that you can type text, such as your browser's address bar.) that allow you to call them up at will - quickly and easily. (One tip: start the name of your snippet abbreviation with an unusual character, such as a backtick (`) to avoid accidentally triggering the text expander.)

For Windows, there is this: https://textexpander.com/

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IJb0wr64FE

I hope this all helps.

Stay safe and happy coding!