Happy IDEs of March: Which code editor do you prefer?

No readers like this yet.
No readers like this yet.
HTML code

Jason Baker for Opensource.com. 

Welcome to the Ides of March, or as we'd like to call it, the IDEs of March. To celebrate, we're asking our readers to let us know which code editing tool they prefer, whether a full-fledged integrated development environment or a simple text editor. Fortunately, there are tons of open source options out there for you to choose from. Which one is your favorite?

Where does the line between an advanced text editor and an IDE actually fall? There are probably as many opinions about that as there are editors to choose from. Most IDEs come with syntax highlighting, autocompletion, a tree view of all of the files in the project, an integrated debugger, built-in support for version control, etc. But many of these tools are available as plugins to your favorite text editor as well.

Whatever tool you choose to use, we'd like to know. Tell us what editor you prefer for writing code, and why this choice is the one you made.

Haven't picked out the perfect IDE for you? We can help.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
3913 votes tallied
Atom
20% (772 votes)
Brackets
4% (158 votes)
Eclipse
9% (350 votes)
Eclipse Che
0% (15 votes)
Geany
4% (140 votes)
KDevelop
3% (104 votes)
NetBeans
6% (241 votes)
Visual Studio Code
25% (984 votes)
A general purpose text editor (vim, emacs, gedit, etc.)
18% (708 votes)
Other (tell us in the comments)
11% (441 votes)

Results

Comments

50 Comments

I prefer eric. Python Ide

Second that choice.

Intellij

For Python I usually use PyCharm, for Java - Sublime Text 3 and sometimes Intellij IDEA.

Qt Creator for C++ and QML

Sublime

To bad it is not open source, but the people of JetBrains are doing a great job delivering IDE's for my daily routine.
For small stuff or "things on the server", I always choose the center of eVIl :-D.

I use pycharm as ide (jetbrains)

jetbrains idea

Vim!

Komodo

How did IntelliJ not make it on this list?

IntelliJ IDEA

Vim! I use it mostly for Python/Django work. I don't see the need for a full fledged IDE for python work.

I program mainly in Ada and I use GPS, the IDE by Adacore. For other languages (matlab, ruby, bash, ) I use emacs

Intellij and Vim.

By far, the most versatile code development environment is a text editor (emacs for heavy pounding, vim for quick stuff), an xterm-equivalent, and all the vast number of tools available or creatable in *ix.

Lazarus!!!!! and FPC, best stuff ever.
Web development sucks because all the damn browsers are the most insecure pieces of crap ever made. If you want a more secure app, use Lazarus on windows (64 or 32bit) it creates small compact singe exes that are easy to deploy.
Ya, it's pascal, but so what? It works great and you can do whatever you need to do including web development if you so choose.

I'm not a developer but I'm learning to code using Builder, it is very nice! https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder

I use Qt Creator for C++ and even C works great

Intellij IDEA

I was a dedicated emacs person until quite recently (aka 2 weeks ago) when a peer pointed me to atom. Now that's my editor of choice :-) (Though I've always wanted to play with Eclipse...)

IntelliJ

IntelliJ

Intellij

Atom and vim

Jetbrains Suite ( java -> intelli-j ; web -> phpStorm )

Shell programming -> Atom

vim + vim-go (go plugin) and a bunch of other plugins.

Everyone should have a try with SpaceVim.

https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim

PyCharm FTW.

Qt Creator for CMake, C, C++, Python

Emacs. :-)

PyCharm for Python and Sublime for the rest.

I am afraid, closed PhpStorm it is what I am using. Before, I prefered KDevelop, but it lacks behind with a lot of features related to PHP. First alternative would be Netbeans (voted for), but I do not really feel comfortable with it. For occasional edits i use vim, not for every-day programming however.

IntelliJ

Atom was my choice because, it starts of light by design but can be extended to support almost every kind of setup with very little effort.
The fact that it is so easy to develop extensions for means that there is an extension for almost anything, even very niche stuff. As someone who works with Symfony and the default templating language (Twig), there are only a handful of editors that support this syntax type and Atom is one of them whilst also allowing me to integrate Docker control, GIT diffs with minimap and automated comment creation. It can become a swiss army knife to suit you (and your work environment) and I believe it is the best gift a web developer has been given since GIT.

Pycharm

I think there is a huge portion of this question missing.... Which is which language are you referring to?

Here's my rundown
C/C++ - Code::Blocks (by far my ultimate fav IDE)
Python - Pyzo
Java - Eclipse
Bash - Vim/Scite
and for quick edits, it's just plain Scite. Scite opens blazingly fast, can quickly and cleanly allow me to change a line or two and continue on.

I use NetBeans for JEE and C/C++ development; Android Studio (IntelliJ) for Android development (of course); and PyCharm for Python.

Spyder for python.

Spyder for Python is perfect, of course.
Have you tried it yet?

It's super easy, has fantastic visualization and is really fast.

For Perl, Python, Bash and Ruby I'm using Sublime Text3. Sublime Text has a lot of Plugins to extend it. For Asciidoc I'm using Atom which has very nice plugins for preview and generation of documents from Asciidoc. For Perl and Python debugging I'm using the Komodo IDE.

I find it jarring that Vim and Emacs are considered "basic editors". Both offer an impressive line of plugins that make them competitive as IDEs on their own. Combine them with screen/tmux and bash/zsh, and you have a very flexible and powerful IDE indeed.

It's been a rather long road to get to where I am, but I'm here because I saw presentations describing just what you can do with Vim, and I was convinced that I needed to find plugins that put Vim on par (and beyond) the Eclipse and Netbeans IDEs I had used for work. I have since developed a deep appreciation for this "basic editor".

I had also used Emacs for a while, but while I appreciated the powerful things it did, I couldn't help but notice that Vim maps to my thinking better for some reason. I still use Emacs for simple spreadsheets, though, and I have recently seen a demonstration of Evil Mode for Emacs (which gives Emacs Vim bindings), so when I get the time, I'm going to look at that.

But either way, Vim and Emacs may seem simple (if you're looking far away, and squinting your eyes), but they are far more powerful than people give then credit for.

Where does it say "basic editors?" I see "general purpose" which is in fact what they are!

Nope, I had to review the article, and saw that you're right: the poll says "general", and not "basic". In my defense, I came to this poll from an article that, after linking to the poll, asked "How are you Vim and Emacs guys still using basic editors, when there are these great IDEs around?"

I could have sworn that the linking article had quoted the poll...

No problem. I'm a vim user too. If I had seen it called basic I would have come to vims defense too!

Pycharm community edition: for Python, bash script, Asciidoctor, XML (when I must!), HTML (when I must!)

I've used eclipse for more than a decade. Primarily because the developers I worked with used it so really I had no choice. After using NetBeans for enterprise level web applications on my own I can honestly say I will not use eclipse again if given a choice. Web server and database configuration is so much simpler. It seems changes in eclipse "server" configuration (web) can easily break your project leading to hours trying to figure out what you did wrong. Netbeans is smarter overall in avoiding these types of issues which makes me far more productive.

Lazarus, I like that it is both good to throw together a quick GUI util, as well as fully fleshed out applications.

My choice is Codelobster IDE: http://www.codelobsteride.com