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Comment by agentgt | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody else use several editors all the time? I use Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, Atom, and Intellij. I don't stick to one.

I wish I could stick to one editor but there is always some editor that does a way better job at a particular task. Each editor has its killer feature. I have tried turning emulation of emacs/vim on many editors to provide consistency and its never been really good. Thus I have several "default" keybindings in my head.

Because of this I try not to rely on too much magic or customization that any editor provides and instead write lots of shell scripts (Bash, Groovy and Python) to do code generation and to find things.

But I'm always wondering ... could I be more efficient by sticking to one.

VSCode will probably just become another editor I have lying around. Probably for Typescript.

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I'd wager a lot of people (myself included) who prefer one editor really do this because it's just easier to mentally handle. Because of that I wouldn't necessarily believe them (or again, me) if they told you they're more productive this way. I don't think It's necessarily true.

It's pretty much required to keep CUA hotkeys in your head in some form. So I find switching between Emacs/Eclipse tolerable and kind of necessary if I'm doing Java.

I think switching between Emacs and Vim is a good idea but more a question of keeping your hand/mind coordination flexible for different input paradigms. I'd be skeptical that they're really that different in terms of efficiency for a task, but I'd say learning both really well will make you more efficient in general.

I'm using Emacs all the time (slowly migrating towards using Vim keybindings; I tried Spacemacs for a while, but for now I'll stick to my regular one and Evil Mode) whenever I can get away with it. Unfortunately, my current job involves a lot of Java code, for which it is hard to beat Java IDEs in terms of suggestions / autocomplete. I'm too lazy to figure out how to make ECLIM work, so I'm switching back and forth between Emacs and Eclipse at the moment.

(I actually keep both open; Java files I edit in Eclipse, but pretty much anything else goes to Emacs. I also have Emacs keybindings and Emacs+ plugin installed in Eclipse.)

I'm constantly switching. Right now I'm on vim for js/html and IntelliJ for Java. I've used ST3 quite a bit. I used Atom for a while, Brackets for a while, VS Code for a bit.

The only thing that trips me up really is switching from vim to one of those others, and I sometimes run vim modes in those.

Yes vim keys frequently trip me up.

One of the major reasons I keep vim in my repertoire is that it is on every machine I have to SSH into and it can handle monstrous files. Vim is also better at editing config files (SSH ops stuff) in general since you are typically manipulating and not creating content.

Aside from different tools having different strengths, I enjoy learning to use new software. I think if I used one tool for everything I would get bored with it.

That said, learning new keyboard commands is sometimes a real PITA. When I'm tired, I sometimes find myself trying to close Visual Studio or Sublime Text with :q.

Then you have people like me that use so many different editors because I'm burned out on learning to use new software.

For a task I'll use whichever editor needs to least amount of learning, re-learning, and fiddling.

It amazes me that there was a time where I learned Emacs just for Clojure.

How odd. I've used the same text editor for twenty-plus years now (hint: it has yet to be mentioned) and I find that I no longer have to think how to use it---it just happens. Then again, I consider the Unix command line as my IDE [1].

[1] Every few years I'll try an IDE. I've been doing this for over twenty-five years. I've yet to find one that I like. Over time, my bar for "what I like" has fallen to the point where now it's "it doesn't crash when loading a simple one file program." [2]

[2] The C/C++ "version" of Eclipse. I tried using it to help browse a C++ application at work. It never worked.

Odd? I don't think so... I've worked with lots of incredibly talented programmers and I think every single one of them has different preferences.

My favorite place to work right now is on OSX. It's Unix so you get all the command line goodies plus it has a very good GUI and great tools in the graphical environment as well (I'm thinking of XCode). Plus, I think Objective-C is pretty neat.

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