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I dream of the day someone shows me a text editor I can be more efficient in than Vim. With a ~30 line .vimrc I can work on the vast majority of the machines on this planet without any trouble; the appeal of editors like Sublime and Atom simply baffle me.

For context, I was a sublime user until about 2 years ago, and prior to that I worked in Notepad++.

However, I rarely work outside of a terminal. So this definitely guarantees a clear bias.

7 comments

Spacemacs (or even just evil mode) for Emacs. I was a Vim user too for about five years and then I discovered Spacemacs and eventually converted to Emacs keybinds and haven't looked back. The elegance of Emacs is just very hard to surpass.

+1 for Spacemacs, you don't have to discover all different mode for Emacs, just enable corresponding "layers".

I use atom-vim as well as the full suite of extremely flexible key-bindings and I am FAR faster in Atom then I was in native vim. Not only that, but the plugin ecosystem is more suitable for my needs, more hackable, and more modern. As a JavaScript developer, Atom has totally recharged my workflow.

One thing that does need some love is tree-view; I sorely miss the full functionality of NERDTree (paging, text search, etc)

Why do you feel faster using Atom with atom-vim than native vim?

In contrast, it baffles me that some don't understand the draw—even if not personally appealing—of editors like Sublime or Atom.

And I say this as an emacs evil user.

Sublime and Atom might be the next best options after vim for people not willing to learn vim. I use vim, I really like it, but I understand a lot of people might not care too much about it, and both of the mentioned editors are very good.

Have you tried doing iOS development? That would suck without XCode (even though XCode itself sucks)

Why doesn't anyone create a viable, open source XCode alternative? Are all the libraries proprietary?

JetBrains has an IDE called AppCode, an alternative to Xcode (not open source). But it still relies on Xcode for distribution and the UI designer, and it lags far behind the update cycle of Xcode. And that is a commercial company with steady revenue dedicated to making IDE. Imagine the difficulty of an open source alternative.

Honestly, if you were willing to rely on the undocumented SourceKit API then you wouldn't have nearly this many problems.

You are not allowed to link binary not compiled by XCode to iOS/osx ecosystem.

1. It's really hard and 2. mostly

The vast majority of my work has been in open source languages using open source tools. So my experience with xcode is very limited and I imagine your thoughts to be something that may change my tune if I were to be in that ecosystem.

I really enjoy typescript and I really enjoy the cutting edge features. Atom editor is the only editor that has the typescript plugin that works with the latest features of typescript. I hate the performance of atom but it is worth the tooling.

how does it compare to visual studio code?[0] for TS development?

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/

I use them both back and forth for a current TS project, and I think both are very good.

I think the Atom plugin is a little bit better in the "help you and show errors as you type" department. With VS code I have configured a gulp compile and VS Code Task with problem matcher configuration, but that is a little bit slower than the Atom plugins compile/build on save configuration and sometimes doesn't show errors on the correct place. But that might be my configuration, so it could be better than I think.

What Atom also supports and VS Code not is the glob expressions for included files in tsconfig.json.

However most of the time I'm currently preferring VS Code, because the editor is just much more responsive (although Atom got better with the 1.1 update).

Another important thing is that VS code supports node.js debugging (with js and ts), which is really helpful.

Does the typescript auto completion component of Atom the same as in VSCode ?

Maybe tell us what programming languages do you work with.

Elixir, Ruby, JS, and Python.