Text Editors
I am not a *nix commands expert … but a professional? So why not relish educating my brother a couple of nifty commands, especially – find
and grep
, which he was looking into at the time. You can find a few more here if you are interested.
So much for the command line, watch out for the overdose1. I find it funny when people, especially developers, copy files on the command line on a Mac (or Ubuntu for that matter); I mean files on the local machine. Specifically, they either copy the file (Cmd-C
) via the Finder and paste it, or worse drag and drop, on the Terminal 2(/posts/text-editors-rundown/#fn-1559-2). Our next laugh is about editing local files in vim
😆3.
The question isn’t why shouldn’t you edit local files in
vim
💪, the question is why would you (want to)? 🤔
I told my brother I will send him a list of all the text editors that he should install on his machine. Each editor has its own flavor, purpose, particularly power. For instance, the find & replace in TextMate is unparalleled. Each editor also has its own limitations albeit its powers.
Personally, I use every one of them including vim
; one that favors the situation or my mood 😇.
So without further ado ….
Text Editors
👌The industry-accepted contemporary No. 1 editor.
👍Cross platform – Windows, Linux, Mac
👍Used widely by web programmers and everyone else.
👌Even with loads of plugins/extensions, Sublime Text stands all.
👍Multi selection and editing, Column editing
👉See it as if Sublime Text was a few ounces cooler!
👍Cross platform – Windows, Linux, Mac
👎More the plugins, slower it gets, especially the startup
👉Download the beta
👌Best in class find&replace facility offering live preview of matches and text after replacing.
👎Drag and drop file inserts text into the current tab
👎Ctrl/Cmd-N
opens a new window as opposed to new tab4
👎Lack of command window (Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-P
).
👉Download without Extract if you are not dealing PSD
👍 Cross platform – Windows, Linux, Mac
👍The unique thing about Brackets is the wide and tall surface area for editing (compared to all other editors)
👍Clean and elegant. No fuss of themes and colors that every other editor needs.
👍Live preview of HTML file without any extra plugins
👎Every extension takes a toll on the on the startup
👉Well, nothing much interesting
👍… except it offers file comparison without any plugins
👍… and quickly enable see the invisible characters (remember copying text from iMessage 🙄)
Markdown Editors
- Haroopad The de facto markdown app
- Typora Write markdown and experience HTML at the same time. Bravo!
- Classeur
- Mou
- Online
If you haven’t realized, text editing is a fundamental part of using a computer, especially if you are a programmer. Make sure you have options!
Appendix
-
BTW, I don’t hate command line. I just don’t like the idea that using it for everything makes you geeky. ↩︎
-
If you haven’t seen anybody around you copying or editing files on the command line, I envy you. You are lucky. Or are you the one copying/editing on the command line? 😆 ↩︎
-
I wouldn’t waste time engaging in the debate that
vim
andemacs
are the powerful editors and only those with brains can use it. ↩︎ -
Not sure if it can be configured via keyboard shortcuts. ↩︎