I love Gedit. It has syntax highlighting for most languages and a spell checker. I feel thats all I need but one of my friends and one of my college classmates (Ilya) says im crazy and awkward for using it. The dev languages I know and have to programme from time to time in are mainly Java, Python and VB. Gedit has support for syntax highlighting for all of those languages.
I dont know maybe im being unreasonable but I think programming is easiest when its stripped down. Just you and the code. Of course tools can be helpful but refactoring isnt that hard and code completion is for lazy people.
Id love to hear what other people think so ill add a poll. Comment too please.
[polldaddy poll=1801105]
Update: I will reveal the results in two days. I will include peoples choices for the other category. All the results are very interesting so far I have to say.
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Interesting results are coming out in the poll. The others that have been suggested are MonoDevelop, kate and geany. Ill add more comments with the other suggestions if any more are mentioned.
I used to be a big Gedit fan as well, I share your like of minimalism and a distaste for modal editors. However, Gedit choked on large files (1000+ lines) so I switched to Geany, and I love it. Gedit may perform better now than it used to, but I’ve no reason to leave Geany now…
Geany is at 7 now
I used to use Gedit, because I also like a good minimalistic interface. I switched to Bluefish because I liked that it gave me the ability to improve the syntax highlighting patterns (Gedit’s were very insufficient when dealing with complex content like HTML+JavaScript+PHP). But then I discovered Geany.
By default, Geany has some UI clutter (sidebars and stuff), but I just strip that stuff away. In my experience, Geany starts up faster than Gedit and Bluefish, it seems to handle large files just as well if not better, and its syntax highlighter is faster and more correct than Gedit or Bluefish (at least for the web-related stuff I work with).
Overall, I strongly recommend Geany.
Doesn’t it all depend a bit on what you are doing? For example, designing a website would start off with a graphics package, and then probably a simple code editor (kate is for me).
I generally use simple text editors for my stuff but thats only because I code websites, not native applications.
I’ve found stuff like monodevelop and VS.Net great for little projects that need a reasonable UI, but have a small amount of code.
Stephen:
I do web development in vim just like I do C, Assembly, and Java.
VB aside, Eclipse’s reputation as a good Java IDE is well known and I like the Pydev Python plugin a lot.
Oh, and as a side note, please avoid macho, “real programmers use” statements like “code completion is for lazy people”. I constantly have to deal with scientific libraries, with cryptic function names and dozens of parameters given in non-intuitive orders. Code completion increases my productivity a lot in this context and I don’t consider myself lazy for using it.
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Code completion for lazy people? Oh well, I used to write the hardcore way as a child, but now as an adult with little free time and energy, I prefer to waste it in doing the actual code instead of writing everything losing time. Think about it that way
I’m using Geany myself, SVN build, I found about it last month and I found it the best one for my task (open game in C). Some builtin and plugin functions are really useful and convenient. Kate, Vim and Gedit come close in preference and I still use them once in a while when not doing my main project.
Nice to see this post. I personally love the “world” of text editors (I tried almost all of them) and reading discussion about them.
I’m useless without my Vim keybindings, so I use Eclipse with the (non-free) ViPlugin when programming in Java, and for everything else I just use (g)vim. Lack of Vim keybindings in an editor at this point is a dealbreaker for me.
You can take Vim from my cold dead hands.
What’s really painfully missing in Gedit is syntax-folding – that’s why I’d prefer geanny, although I really like the Gedit UI.
Code completion is for lazy people? That’s a fairly bold statement my friend
I love Gedit for the same reasons as you do, but I won’t do any serious programming work with it. Code completion increases productivity, especially when working with unknown apis.
Yeah, I use gedit nearly everywhere (vim occasionally for stuff over ssh, or as a pager, or for a one line fix on a known line).
The performance problem in gedit that I’ve noticed is when you have long lines and word wrap turned on. I think it is a known issue, and there may even be a patch floating around for it somewhere.
On my work computer, sometimes I find myself using windows… and I went looking for a good text editor… I couldn’t find one that I preferred over gedit, even with its non-native widgets.
I’m a big Gedit fan but that may be because I used editplus on that other OS before breaking away. Until I read your post I hadn’t heard of geany so may give it a chance but for the most part I still love Gedit. It is simple, streamlined and doesn’t get in the way.
Grate awesome…
I tend to like gedit, but I’m used to select a word by double-clicking, and when gedit cuts the words with underscores I get mad.
The thing that always bugged me was the fact that tab switching in Gedit does not use the same keyboard shortcut as gnome-terminal and other GNOME apps. I get annoyed with this and other things and switch back to Geany. Or I get annoyed with GNOME and go back to KDE. I’m currently using Kate and KDevelop, but whenever I use GNOME, I use Geany.
Geany forever the best !!!
But for Qt4 developpement I use QtCreator, which use the same highlighting engine as Geany : Scintilla.
Alex – I switch tabs nearly exclusively with Alt+ which works in gnome-terminal, firefox, nautilus and gedit (i.e. the only applications I use with tabs). It is possibly one of the greatest keyboard shortcuts ever.
gah, that “Alt+” should have the word “number” after it. I wrote it in angle braces to make it clear that it was a non-terminal, but the blog software decided I was being sneaky with html
I used to use Emacs for many years. I liked it because I could edit anything (even my email), and the keyboard shortcuts and general philosophy was consistent.
But in the context of Java editing, higher-order functionality is required IMHO so that the coder can start focusing on the interesting bits instead of the low-level details.
Eclipse features I use a lot:
– Navigation: Jump to the definition of this method. Where is this method defined (overridden, generally). Enter a class name with completion and open the class (no need to remember which package the class is in). What is the inheritance hierarchy of this class, jump to an ancestor/descendant.
– Code completion: Abbreviate TheseNastyLongClassNamesThatAllStartSimilarly. List all getters because I forgot the exact name of the one I’m searching for.
– Quick fix: Call a getter and assign it to a variable but forgot what it returned, so just enter a bogus type for the variable and have quickfix suggest the right type. Implement an interface but forgot which methods it contains, let quickfix fill them in. Let quickfix add an import declaration for me.
But I couldn’t live without viPlugin.
I now use vim for miscellaneous coding tasks. Combined with ctags, it does an acceptable job of navigation in procedure languages. (For Java, it just can’t cope with the inheritance hierarchy.)
I havent had any problems but that is mainly because if a file has a lot of lines I break the functionality into different classes. Ill try Geany a good few votes have been cast for it.
Interesting, I never had any performance issues with Gedit but its a very good point about complex content. I did notice that python had a few things missing from the syntax highlighting.
Well I said above what I code using Java, Python and VB and all of them its for desktop programming. So id like if I could do all them in one interface if I can. Gedit at the moment does that but I just want to see what other people would recommend.
Ah I understand but my dev work isnt all that complex. I didnt say “Real programmers use” though. Its understandable using code completion when you know how to do it in the first place but while people (like me) who are learning how to programme code completion makes them very bad programmers IMO maybe im wrong but thats what I think.