What's your favorite editor?

Hello Kirby Family, i just Create This Little Thread Because i wanna to know what your Favorit Editor is and please say Why is that my Favorit Editor? , maybe its Helpfull for someone.
i’m working whit Brackets Because its just a cool Editor whit many Helpfull Plugins or cool Themes and that was my first editor, so i can’t leave from Brackets.

i wish you the best

Simon

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Hi Simon,

I also use Brackets - on my Surface. Mainly due to it being the only code editor I’ve really got on with on the PC platform.

On my MacBook Pro I prefer BBEdit. I’ve been a BBEdit user since 2003, used it through college and university and feel very comfortable with it after all this time.

As I am mainly ‘front-end’ I’ve never really got along with more popular editors such as Sublime or Atom. Instead I favour Coda 2 (more of an IDE) for larger projects.

When I am less busy I’m planning to take Visual Studio Code for a spin. I like the idea of working with the same code editor on PC/Mac (also available for Linux boxes).

Finally, I also like iA Writer for content creation, working with Markdown and note taking etc.

All the best.

John

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Hi,

I also use Brackets. I began with it because it was the only editor to propose an easy way for live view editing. @aoimedia, I will have a look to iA Writer :wink:

All the best,

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For code I currently use Atom. It’s a tad heavy/slow but overall I like it.

As a content editor I use a combination of nvAlt for quick notes and lists, and iA Writer for longer texts. But I’m trying Ulysses and it’s so lovely it will probably replace the other two.

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My favorite editor is, like I have sayed at HowTo: Start Kirby development on a PC, Notepad++ on windows.

Good luck!

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  1. Rapid PHP (not free, but worth the money)
  2. Visual Studio Express (free)
  3. Win32Pad (free)
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Front-end developer here. Working with:

  • Heavy-duty IDE: PhpStorm (it’s a bit slow but once you’re used to the richness of features it’s hard to do without; it’s also been really helpful lately as I was reading Kirby’s code).
  • Smallish editor for rapid editing: Visual Studio Code

I’ve worked briefly with Atom before (nice-looking, some good stuff, but slow) and worked for a long time with Sublime Text (quick, lots of plugins, but aging). So now I favor VS Code for the out-of-the-box JS debugging and the speed (vs Atom or Brackets).

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It’s funny to see Brackets / Atom and even Sublime are merging into Visual Studio Code :slight_smile:

Don’t forget; VS Community / Express is even better… and free as well!

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In our projects, we write our spec files in Markdown - most platform-agnostic way to do it, as everyone uses different types of computers. Having a good Markdown editor was essential for me, and I spent a lot of time doing research and testing several of them out - on the Mac.

IMHO, the best Markdown editor - which you probably never heard of - is the amazing LightPaper. It has loads of useful features that make it stand out from the rest.

As far as Mac editors and IDEs go, I’ve tried most of them: BBEdit, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, Espresso, Smultron, SubEthaEdit, Coda, and Brackets. They all have drawbacks, and they all have their strengths. Sublime, for instance, is by far the fastest, and most extensible, but the interface is truly horrendous: all configuration has to be done via a myriad of text files, using raw JSON. Expect to spend months adding and fine-tuning plugins, to get it to work exactly the way you want it - and to learn all of its keyboard shortcuts. When you eventually do, it’s a powerhouse. Coda, on the other hand, is fantastic for the beginner: beautiful interface, super easy customisation, loads of bundled tools - even the complete set of documentation on HTML/CSS/JS/PHP is built right into the program. But it does not have as many plugins as the others, and power users often end up moving on to more customisable editors.

Ultimately, for me more important than the Editor was choosing the right pre+post-processing tools. These days, every single project we do uses LESS, as well as UI frameworks like UIKit, and javascript libraries like Vue and Velocity. It is, therefore, extremely important for us to choose tools that make it easy for us to work with these languages and technologies - ie., to be able to process these files automatically, applying post-processing tools like AutoPrefixer, as well as concatenating and minifying the files, as we save them - and seeing those changes live, on multiple browsers and devices, as we make them.

Most editors have plugins that allow you to do some processing, using languages like LESS, Jade, Coffeescript, etc. Some editors can compile your LESS files, for instance, as you save them. Others might even allow you to run autoprefixer over the compiled file. But none of them does everything - such as easily compiling, post-processing, concatenating, minifying and previewing, all together - not even with plugins.

In order to get a completely automated workflow like that, you will usually need to use command-line tools: Bower (for managing dependencies on frameworks and libraries), Grunt and Gulp (for automating pre+post-processing tasks), with add-ons like Browsersync, to be able to preview your changes live, as you go. But each one of these tools requires time to learn, time to setup, and end up greatly increasing the complexity of even the simplest projects. They also require you to clog up your computer with dozens of command-line apps, extensions and add-ons.

And that is when I came across CodeKit. This is a very clever program, that bundles all of those tools in a neat, graphical user interface, that is unbelievably easy to use. It is now by far the most important tool in my programming toolbox - and the best $35 I ever spent. It allows me to use whatever editor I please, giving me the full power of Bower and Gulp, as well as setting up an automatic previewing server, without me having to instal any command-line tools in my system, or any plug-ins in my editor. It makes using these fantastic tools amazingly easy: no complex setups needed, it all just works - and it freed me from worrying about editors…

I hope this information helps.

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I’m still sticking with Sublime Text. I tried Atom and Code but somehow didn’t find the time to feel at home. For me switching editors is always a monstrous task. It’s all about habits :slight_smile:

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Sublime Text 2 + Markdownpad 2 Pro (for Github plugin docs)

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I am currently using Atom for most of my work, because it has good support for a variety of linters. I’ve been a Coda for years, but the lack of inline linting has become an annoying experience, because it saves a lot of time to see stuff like missing semicolons or unclosed strings at runtime. There are also great plugins for aligning indented text or running Gulp (my current build tool) from inside the editor. What I am missing are the great FTP publishing features of Coda, so in fact I am still using both of those editors for different tasks …

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Im am using Sublime Text but started switching to Atom for some projects, because imho it has a better autocomplete.

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Exactly that’s the reason I made the complete switch from Sublime to Atom few months ago. Never looked back!

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wow!! thanks a lot for that nice replies !!, i have try many Editors like atom and PHPStorm, But i’m not a PHP Genius so i doesen’t Really Need a Big Editor Like PHPStorm, Atom and Brackets are my Favorties :slight_smile:

Brackets look and feel friendly for newbies like me.

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I just switched from Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code:

It did not feel akward like Atom and Brackets felt. It feels fast and not bloated.

Some of my personal advantages to Sublime Text:

  • It’s free and open source.
  • Very similar to Sublime Text.
  • It has a great light theme built in.
    In Sublime Text I used a Notepad++ theme for that, but it was a bit of work to get it in.
  • It has a markdown editor built in, with a great preview. Before I used MarkdownPad 2 and I even paid for it.

Click the image below to enlarge:

I don’t know if this is my favourite yet because I’ve only used it like a day, but it has been great so far.

Thanks @bastianallgeier for mentioning this editor.

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Surprised nobody has mentioned Komodo IDE. Its a decent editor but not free, although there is a free edition with all the important bits. Both are also available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Personally I use Atom, but the lack of large file support is frustrating.

Oh my… Komodo IDE looks almost exactly like Visual Studio Code.

By the way I’ve already discovered new pros and cons with Visual Studio Code

Pros

  • It has the terminal built in. No more switching between windows when looking for the terminal to run Gulp for example.
  • Git is also built in and it seems to be really simple, but I have not tried it out yet.

Cons

  • It seems like I can’t have a dark color theme for the terminal part and a bright theme for the code at the same time. Maybe a minor issue for most people.

There are similarities, yes except that Komodo has been around for 17 years. So, probably VSC looks like Komodo is more accurate… :slight_smile:

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