What editor do you use?
Honestly, how often do you hear that question? Because I do hear it a lot, and it drives me nuts. What’s so important in tools you use? Why is your new, shiny shovel, made out of carbonated steel better, from my old, rusty one? It does it’s job, right? Why people focus on their gear so much, instead of what they can achieve with it? And that’s what I’m going to share my thoughts on today.
Editor, IDE, terminal, plugins. You can hear people arguing about their favorite… exactly, about what? I can’t call IDE an editor, because that’s going to start the storm, the storm of hate. And I won’t lie, I was involved in this kind of storms so many times. But fortunately, I always was on the exact opposite to those people.
Let’s face the truth; WE ARE LUCKY. I mean, us, JavaScript developers. Aren’t we? Look, we don’t need to compile our code, we don’t need tons of plugins in order to even open our projects. Right? I mean, we can have those, if we chose to go with TypeScript or CoffeeScript for instance. Or in case we want to use the newest, not supported (yet) functionality; we can always use Babel for ES6+. But we don’t have to use them. Did you ever develop in Java, C#? I did. That’s something their developers can’t say. They got no choice, they got to use IDE. They got to compile their code. Why am I saying all that you may ask? Well, I’m trying to point out, how little we need to produce the software. We could use regular notepad, on it’s own and yet — how big impact those tools have on us.
Going back to the question. What Editor do I use? I use Atom. Why you may ask? Because it’s nice and lightweight. I use no plugins (except syntax highlighting), I just use it as my text editor. I used Sublime Text, I used VSC. I used notepad++. You know why I switched? Answer is — I don’t know. And I don’t care. VSC is too advanced. notepad++ has awful design. Sublime Text is great, but I couldn’t find the right template for it. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous? I bet it does. The only reason I chose Atom was one, single template I’ve found. All I need is block of text, on nice, background, that wont make me squeeze my eyes. That’s it. That wasn’t something Sublime could offer me, that wasn’t something VSC beta could do so either.
But let’s get this clear, because I may sound a bit like a hypocrite; I’m not saying, Atom is better from any of mentioned above. I’m not saying you should use it. All I do say is; don’t focus on tools, focus on benefits, you could potentially get out of using them. You got to deliver the product, it’s not a fashion competition, where you’re being judged by your workspace. You got to do your work, and what you gonna use for that — is your business*. Seriously. Nobody cares about your editor, nobody cares about what toilet paper you use. Use what you need.
