(after all, 75$ is quite a lot of money for a text editor)

I don't really buy that line of reasoning. As a programmer, you spend what, 90% of your time in a text editor?

Of course, prices for text editors are generally depressed by the number of free editors available, and by the fact that several of those (primarily Vim and Emacs) are more powerful than pretty much all of the commercial offerings...

I don't really buy that line of reasoning. As a programmer, you spend what, 90% of your time in a text editor?

That's absolutly true. But most of the code I write is in C++ for which I use Visual Studio on Windows and Qt Creator on Ubuntu. And for the few things for which I need a different editor, 75$ is quite much when there are free tools available (and you are a student ).
But that is something that differs a lot from person to person. If I would e.g. do more web development I would probably use Sublime as my primary development tool in which case, of course, 75$ would be nothing.

(after all, 75$ is quite a lot of money for a text editor)

I don't really buy that line of reasoning. As a programmer, you spend what, 90% of your time in a text editor?

Of course, prices for text editors are generally depressed by the number of free editors available, and by the fact that several of those (primarily Vim and Emacs) are more powerful than pretty much all of the commercial offerings...

I spend maybe 40% of my time "tops" in front of a text editor, and most of that time is spent simply typing, not using any advanced features that aren't present in pretty much all IDEs. If i stick to advanced features that are on a per editor basis then i'm down to way less than 1% of my time.

Lots of good info to digest. I am going to take the advice that, at the end of the day, vim is more trustworthy and established.

I was just wondering if these new "shiny toys" raise any eyebrows, or whether they just look like that-- shiny toys.

I am rather unstablished myself, so I couldn't know the advantages or disadvantages of one over the other.

This isn't a debate, just an inquiry,

Thanks again.

I don't really buy that line of reasoning. As a programmer, you spend what, 90% of your time in a text editor?

WARNING!, I am about to start ranting:

I have encountered programmers who do this, and I can't for the life of me understand this. A programmer should use an IDE. An IDE with refactoring, inline debugging, built in compiler support for on the fly compiling etc. I even use an IDE for javascript. I think that using a text editor is neglegence, as it enocurages one not to refactor ( I have to copy all of those function variables by hand?!?!?! ), not to write tests, etc...

When I encounter this at work, these people tell me: "Oh I can SSH and have been using this since the Unix days when I was managing Bell Laboratories". (Meant to be read cynically)

I have personally been programming before good IDEs where available (Turbo C anyone?), and I do not think anyone should ever be forced to work like that. The only exception is if you are working with some strange embedded compiler that has a bad tool chain.

A good programmer should find a good IDE for his purposes. If he can not find a good IDE he can revert to using Eclipse (Which is a not-so-good IDE which has plugins for just about anything).

Sorry about the rant.

As a text editor I usually use Notepad++ on Windows, and Nano on SSH. I never bothered paying for anything because I rarely use a text editor at work.

The text editor is not an important tool for me. It's so unimportant that I can accomplish a significantly high enough percentage of what I need by just keeping a shortcut to Notepad (not Notepad++, just plain old Notepad) in my Send To menu.

For writing code I use Visual Studio; the text editing features there are fine, but they're not the reason why I choose that tool: the real reason is (like SillyCow) the integration of all the other tools needed for a full write/compile/debug/test/run/etc cycle.

For everything else plain old Notepad suffices; the only missing feature is the ability to handle Unix line endings, but that comes up so rarely that I've never felt a need to switch.

Other than that I'm more likely to be using various GUI admin tools, log viewers, CLI tools, installers, etc.

I have encountered programmers who do this, and I can't for the life of me understand this. A programmer should use an IDE. An IDE with refactoring, inline debugging, built in compiler support for on the fly compiling etc. I even use an IDE for javascript. I think that using a text editor is neglegence, as it enocurages one not to refactor ( I have to copy all of those function variables by hand?!?!?! ), not to write tests, etc...

Text editing is just one part of an IDE, and IDE is just a collection of tools someone else is in charge of collecting together. People that forego the IDE experience don't forego any of the things you say they do. I assure you that if you ever watch a Vim master refactor their code, your mouth will be left agape when you realize that their hands never left the keyboard and they're done before the IDE-users hand has even reached their mouse. I regularly use Vim to make large groups of mechanical edits to lines of text -- a few lines of vim commands allows me to define my own refactoring on-the-fly and then apply it to the whole file or to a few lines. I can do all that even though my Vim-fu is decidedly yellow-belt. Every Vim-using programmer has a couple shells open -- one their build prompt, another for their debugger, maybe one more with an interactive shell for the language they're using -- and you can issue shell commands right from Vim too.

IDEs do a lot of great things, but that doesn't mean that Vim (or emacs, et al) users go without those same things. Vim together with a couple other standalone tools will do it all, and if you organize the windows on your workspace just right, it looks an awful lot like an IDE.

It all comes down to which tool you can increase your efficiency the most in.

My memory is too poor to remember keyboard shortcuts, and I'm so uncoordinated with a keyboard, that I'm actually faster with a graphical interface than a keyboard only one, so I'm far more efficient with an IDE. But as Ravyne has said, someone who can master Vim and a few other tools can work incredibly fast.

i heard the dev of sublime is not responding and people are freaking out a bit. I like it but maybe not the best option for the future. It is closed source after all.

WARNING!, I am about to start ranting:

I have encountered programmers who do this, and I can't for the life of me understand this. A programmer should use an IDE. An IDE with refactoring, inline debugging, built in compiler support for on the fly compiling etc.

See, my experience runs pretty much exactly the opposite: IDEs are a useful tool under ideal conditions, but it turns out that engineers are often asked to perform under adverse conditions...

On the fly compilation is a bit of a non-issue when your software takes multiple hours to compile. Inline debugging is not terribly useful when your target platform doesn't have a functioning debugger. Refactoring plugins don't help all that much when your refactor has to touch 3 entirely different programming languages in one operation.

And god forbid you ever get stuck on a layover in Salt Lake City with only an underpowered loaner netbook, shitty airport wifi, and your deadline is the next morning. I, on the other hand, did just fine, what with my terminal window and vim.