(Graphical) IDE’s are great for development, but they’re slow to start and heavy to run. Sometimes you just want to take a quick look at an xml or dockerfile and you don’t want to spin up the whole IDE for that.
I’ve recently rediscovered notepad++ for that (on windows), what’s your prefered easy-acces-tekst-editor?
Helix. Instant startup. Minimal configuration required. Has all of the killer features I want from an IDE anyway.
EDIT: I assumed people would just research this anyway, but a more complete list of features I enjoy from Helix:
- very responsive
- modal editing
- declarative configuration file format (TOML, not Lua)
- language server protocol
- debug adapter protocol
- written in Rust so I am more likely to be able to submit a PR if I need to
Some cons (all known issues on github):
- no plugin API yet
- inline LSP diagnostics are overly intrusive and can overlap your code
- cold-starts the LSP when you start the editor, so you might need to wait for symbol queries in a large project
Helix deserves more love. Blazing fast, sensible defaults, good lsp support, vim-ish bindings. It’s really my perfect editor
For anyone trying it out for the first time: If you aren’t sure how to do something, it’s probably hitting the spacebar in normal mode. That will bring up a list of shortcuts, including the debugging, file chooser, and actions (for the lip)
vim. Just basic vim, I don’t jazz it up to be all IDE-like. I want my vim to behave exactly like it would if I’m on some random other computer.
If I need autocomplete, ability to jump to the definition of stuff and so forth I use whatever the other people on the project use, which is often vscode these days.
Kate, though it gets a bit IDE like.
Vim if I’m on Linux, notepad++ if I’m on windows. Though I will use VSCode in both OS if want to make a lot of changes and run the file.
I wouldn’t normally point out a spelling mistake but… Why did you spell text like that?
In some languages tekst is their native word for text. OP seems to at very least know dutch, where that seems to be the case.
