Pycharm is great for Python. The style enforcement is fantastic.
Emacs. Everything else feels lobotomised
I don't know what the best IDE is, but I know what the best text editor is.
VS Code at work, Zed at home.
Despite Zed crashing my laptop every once in a while, it's been a refreshing change-up from VS Code.
I use a vim extension in both btw...
Doesn't Zed have a vim mode by default?
ed
Notepad
Vim when I can, and when I can't, Neovim with plugins (LazyVim). Both are fast. I have had troubles with Neovim and configuration, and it does some things that really annoy me (like autoclosing parentheses - it just messes up everything). Honestly, the only feature that I really need is Go To Definition.
But vim - I absolutely love it. I started using it nearly 20 years ago and it still does everything one could want if you're willing to learn the keymaps and commands. Macros, ci), block indentation and so on. It's even great for editing XML. If the codebases I'm working on these days weren't so large and complicated, I would still be using it with very little configuration in my .vimrc.
I don't use lazyvim, but I found the "auto pairs" plugin you can try to disable
I use a different IDE for each language in which I code
I use vscodium and it is available on AUR (vscodium / vscodium-bin). Supposedly there are some plugins not available for it, but i don't use a ton of plugins and the ones I used in vscode were available in vscodium when i switched.
@starshipwinepineapple @rklm I mainly use Theia IDE, similar and compatible to vscode extensions, but not tied to microsoft
Jetbrains IDE's are top tier (but resource hungry). A text editor with some plugins is fine for smaller projects, like zed, sublime text or neovim
I've tried lots of options, and I still go back to vscode.
I've extensively used neovim and it has been my main IDE for years, but I got tired of having to spend entire afternoons configuring it. And I had too many total breaks, that had led me to recently abandon it as an IDE, still use it sometimes but much less. It relies on too many plugins, which makes breaks more common imho.
I tried helix. But features are far from what I expect for an IDE, even a modal command line one.
On the gui territory, I tried Lapce, but it's still buggy and lacks features. Development pace is slow enough so I don't consider it could become my ide in the near future, I have hopes for it, but not much as it could easily become abandoned before it's usable.
I wanted to try Zed, but they seems to have a preference for macOS, which may have sense in the US but here I don't remember the last developer I saw using a mac. There's now a linux version, which I may try at some point, but some people commented that while in a better state than Lapce it's not still a production ready option for an text-editor-IDE. Also the company behind it doesn't inspire trust to me. There's something about it that smells fishy, I cannot quite put my finger on what, but there's something.
There are more options, some obscure, some old, some paid. For instance I usually hear good things about jetbrains ide. I tried intellij community and I'm not impressed, it's slightly better than eclipse, but it's not on the level of visual studio for dotnet. I'm not a student and I don't get paid for my hobby developments so paid options are a no-go.
So it is visual studio code for me. Sometimes I still use neovim, as I really like modal editors, and vim/neovim is my go to text editor anyways. I'm due to try emacs, and I'm hopeful for the future of both helix and Lapce, though I manage my emotions as I've know too many projects that just never deliver, so I'm cautious.
Unix is my IDE, vim is my editor.
Based.
The universe is my IDE, my hands are my editor.
Xcode because I build iOS apps.
The Unix shell remains an excellent IDE.
A huge array of text- and data-manipulation tools, with more available through the standard package manager in my operating system.
Add in a powerful text editor like Vim or Emacs, and nothing can beat this IDE.
Yep. When everything about your IDE (unix) is programmable, it makes "modern" IDEs seem quite quaint.
Personally I make extensive use of https://f1bonacc1.github.io/process-compose/launcher/ to orchestrate a bunch of different shell scripts that trigger based on file changes (recompiling, restarting servers, re-running tests, etc.). Vim just reads from files as needed. It's lightning fast, no bloat, and a world-class editing experience.
That looks interesting, I see it's been discontinued 2 years ago though, is there a maintained fork that you use?
NeoVim. Once I looked at vim as an IDE, I won't look back
Neovim
I tried using VSCode because of the copilot integration, but frankly copilot is underwhelming for me. I gave “vibe coding” a shot on a personal project and the results were slower than just doing it myself.
I’m back to neovim. I’m very productive in customizing it and can never go back.
There's avante.nvim for LLM integration, it supports most if not all LLM vendors at the moment.
I tried it, however, and got to the same conclusion as you. Not worth it.
My three IDE’s of choice in order of preference:
EMacs: ultimative workhorse which can do many more - especially with org-mode (however, time intensive to configure which is why I used also ChatGPT to get it done)
VSCodium: easy to manage almost anything due to its huge number of extensions
Vim: don’t know, sometimes I feel the need to work with Vim and it’s many shortcuts
All are free and open source.
Zed is delightful to work with, highly recommend it. It is very customizable, and debugger support is coming soon. It's like neovim but I don't have to spend 15% of my time maintaining it...
no debugger
vim
Just wanted to throw Kate into the mix of suggestions…
So this is the image originally posted here somewhere, or was it on reddit, asking about which linux distro was it, and the screenshot (bottom left corner) was from the landing image on the link you posted.
Emacs!
With LSPs it works for just about anything and Magit is simply too good.
I switched to Emacs over two years ago because I was getting too comfortable in VS Code. If VS Code didn't have the "dodgy" stuff, I would recommend it to everyone without reservation.
Emacs has been a pleasant surprise. The latest versions have introduced Eglot (LSP), EditorConfig and a few other odds and ends that make it very close to being usable with very little configuration. My latest suggestion for getting started is JUST two lines of config, and I think you can scale easily.
I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it's worthwhile, but still...
However, due to how it's evolving lately, I suspect it might become even easier to get started with time. If they rolled in to base Emacs automatic LSP installation, that would be huge, for instance.
for some people it's nice to start from nothing and build up config, I'd recommend doom for anyone else. it's nice to be given a file with all the settings you can change instead of having to do it all yourself.
I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it’s worthwhile, but still…
Surely you mean, "I wish Microsoft had adopted the standard Emacs keybindings."
Right now, the jetbrains IDEs are my favourite because they are proper IDEs, not some editor with a bunch of scripts in a trenchcoat pretending to be an editor. But the company is starting to lose touch with its customers: developers who want an IDE for productivity, not a VS Code lookalike. It's like the company is finally being taken over by managers who don't know lick about development and it's starting to show (at least to me).
Now, I'm on the market for a new editor and even willing to pay, even though I'd prefer paying for an open source IDE. Right now, Zed is looking interesting. The only thing that bothers me is how loud people were about it. Hype destroys my faith in stuff as it's often just good marketing. Another thing that bugged me is that when they started, they were "Mac first, Linux maybe". But now that the hype has died down, there's much less "omg, zed is the new editor and it will be better anything else" type posts, and it supposedly works on Linux, I can give it a try.
I agree with everything you said about jetbrains. Their vs code like push and AI push has degraded their quality.
I'm paying for the All Products Pack by Jetbrains, use them pretty much exclusively.
I just started a Python course. My tutor uses Thonny and I have tried Pycharm previously and prefer it. Maybe because I am lazy or because I prefer all the autofill I can get. And I need all the highlighting. I am code blind.
Static typed languages usually have better auto fill suggestions than dynamic ones. It's harder to make good auto fill with dynamic languages so.
That's not being lazy, that's pretty much using the tool that was made exactly for this purpose.
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
