Monday, October 29, 2012

A Good Code Editor Is Easy To Find

I've been playing around with Sublime Text, which is a code editor with a very active community.  I thought it was nice, but after years of using Eclipse, no big deal.  However, some people whom I respect (the guys at Bitovi have turned me and several of my Coworkers on to it) insisted that it was the best editor for programming that you can find.

To decide for yourself, I recommend the videos that Jeff Way at Nettuts put together to improve your workflow.  Watch the first one (it's only 2.5 minutes long) to get a feel for whether it's worth watching any of the rest.  If you watch just a couple more, I'll bet you'll be hooked, though.

What do I like about it?  I'll summarize in terms that are the most important to me:

  • Multi-platform (Linux, Windows and OSX - all platforms I use regularly).
  • You can open a folder and use it like a project.  None of the long tedious "import" BS that you have to do in Eclipse.
  • Quick file and symbol searching.  (Seriously, I can type command-P, part of a file name, "@" and part of a symbol to drill to a particular method in a particular Java class.  That's all kinds of awesome!)
I never much liked vi (though I can use it in a half-assed way), and I'm not all that thrilled with using a heavyweight IDE like Eclipse (the flakiness outweighs the benefits of having a continuous build too).

Now I can finally be one of those guys who is comfortable with just a shell and a stand-alone editor to do all of their programming work.  That's a level of nerd-cool that I have heretofore reserved for people like Magnus.

Maybe I should grow a beard.