Editing text.

06 May 2019

I use my computer for more than 12 hours every day. And most of this time is spent on editing text. Either to code, write documentation or even to write a blog post like this. So the text editor I’m using is a very important part of my life.

I have a very diverse history of text editors. Started from good old Notepad and shifted to Notepad++. Then I moved to Sublime Text which I used for a very long time. I loved its features and ability to personalize. But the major issue with Sublime Text was it is a commercial product. This was unacceptable with all the other free and open source text editors.

After for some time I used only full-featured IDEs such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, and IntelliJ. Though these came with a lot of helpful features, they came with exhaustive resource usage. I couldn’t run by IDE and Photoshop simultaneously. Therefore I had to move back to a lightweight text editor unless the project necessarily needs such IDE (Android, Spring and etc).

My first choice after the change is Atom. Open source lightweight text editor supported by GitHub. I used it for a little while but it didn’t become natural to me as Sublime Text. So I tried weird different text editors for a while such as Brackets. After a while, Microsoft announced Visual Studio Code. Since then I’m using VSCode for all of my text editings. Even for large production-ready projects.

Because of VSCode’s customizability, I have a fully custom text editor with just what I need. I use IntelliJ key maps because I’m used to it and sometimes I have to shift to IntelliJ. I always use dark themes, and currently, it’s Dracula with default VSCode icons. I don’t use tabs or sidebar explorer, they waste editor’s space and Ctrl+Shift+N is faster than those. And most of the time editor is split to two and with the internal terminal in the bottom.

So this is my text editor preference and I don’t think that I’ll change VSCode for a while.