On Text Editors

Created Friday 23 May 2025

Things to look for:


Vim - Arguably the biggest old-school non-CUA dinosaur that nonetheless remains VERY popular. Especially with the modern variant NeoVim.

Can be used as is or hacked into just about anything with a plugins, and plugin systems; there are essentially "distros" of Vim like "Lunarvim"

Emacs - The other big old school dinosaur, not CUA and ALSO not modal. It's so popular because it's old and *extremely* customizable, it's written in Lisp and you can rewrite it with itself. It's an incredibly interesting self contained model that can do anything; but fwiw — I LOVED the idea, used it for a few years, then eventually completely gave it up because it does NOT play nicely with ANYTHING else.

VSCode: It's a big clunky monster that tries to do everything, and for many, succeeds. Just be WARY of it as a platform to get stuck to, my initial impressions are not good, especially in terms of doing the evil thing of "handling file saving differently from other places"


Language specific IDEs.


Backlinks: FSU Courses:LIS5367