Picking a Text Editor is a big deal

Recently, I got back to frontend development after almost a year. I’m working with React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and a bunch of other tools to support building and maintaining some frontend components.

It was all going well until my text editor of choice, Sublime Text 4 (ST4), popped a notification asking me to upgrade my license. I bought the ST4 license back in 2021 when it was released. I’ve been a paying customer since 2011. I’ve switched to other editors in between and even toyed with the idea of writing my own, but I always saw myself come back to ST. Anyway, back to my original point – when I saw the pop-up, I started to wonder if it is indeed time to explore new editors.

In the recent times, Zed has made major strides in developing a fast editor. There are several drawbacks to it IMO, but it shows promise. With the latest tech and tooling available, I want to be able to leverage ’em all.

One of the main things that led me to believe that ST4 is not the future is the lack of support for it. For instance, there’s no official Copilot support for it. I’m fairly certain the Product team at several of these projects did their research on text editor usage and decided to support the ones that are used the most. It looks like ST4 didn’t make the cut.

Lately, in terms of text editor support, it has been either NeoVim, Visual Studio Code, or IntelliJ. IntelliJ is proprietary software and they have the resources to support every tech out there even if the tech doesn’t their official support. I’ve used IntelliJ for Scala development and well, it’s an IDE, so, it was okay I guess.

I am a strong believer that if you use a IDE (not a simple text editor), you can only maximize its capabilities if you have a good dev environment. If it’s configured poorly, even the best IDE can’t help you stay productive. Similarly, if you have a great dev environment setup, even the worst IDE with a basic configuration can help you stay productive. It’s a fact that not all dev environments are well setup. I’ve worked in fantastic dev environments and horrible ones. It all boils down to the engineer(s) driving the setup effort and it’s of utmost importance that they have taste. It is one of those things in software development that most tend to not prioritize.

Long story short, I’m currently doing some research to pick my next text editor. I know exactly what I’m looking for:

1. Support all of latest tech and tooling, at least at a basic level.
2. If there’s something basic that I don’t like, I want to be able to customize it or change it.
3. It should be fast. Performing text manipulations with multiple cursors shouldn’t be slow or sluggish.
4. No noticeable typing latency. I cannot stand typing latency. I have a gift and curse to notice typing latency.
5. Lower priority: It should exude aesthetic value. When I use it, I should know that someone put in a lot of thought into why a feature exists. This is what I feel when I use most off Apple’s products.

Over the next few weeks I will try out a few editors and try them out and see what I pick. I will report back my selection and my findings.

Update 11/12/2024: After using most of the available editors, I chose to go with VS Code due to the sheer amount of extension support available from a very healthy community.