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Both seem to be great to learn for programming, are there other editors with a less steep learning curve?

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12  
Vim is absolutely worth suffering the learning curve. Take it from someone that was turned off by Vim many times before finally taking the time to actually learn it. – George Marian Sep 9 '10 at 23:25
Learn Vim! Honestly, i tried a few times to 'get it' and failed. I made the decision to stick at it until i learned how to use it properly and now i can easily see why many good programmers use it! It is awesome and saves so much typing and messing about with a mouse! – Gary Willoughby Nov 15 '11 at 19:34

9 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Textmate is usually regarded as one of the three. And, although with a (much) less steel learning curve, Notepad++ seems very popular amongst programmers.

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+1 Too bad there is nothing comparable to Notepad++ running on Linux >>. – Oliver Weiler May 30 '12 at 8:06
up vote 15 down vote

Sure, Eclipse/Visual Studio/<Insert IDE of Choice Here> are great for programming in languages that they support. The problem is, they all suck as editors. Both Vim and Emacs have a steepish learning curve, but it only took me a week to be as productive in Vim as I was in Notepad++. In three weeks, I was slightly more productive, and two months or so later, I was waaay more productive. Now (about 8 months later), I'm about twice as productive with Vim as I was with Notepad++, at least when writing or editing code.

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5  
The only problem with Vim is that I find myself typing :w when I want to save a Word document. – Chinmay Kanchi Sep 9 '10 at 23:31
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You think that's a problem? I press "C-x C-c" to exit, which first cuts some text, then copies some more, which deletes the text I had there in the first place. This is why I love undo. – Joe D Sep 17 '10 at 19:02
up vote 4 down vote

There is modern & interesting http://www.sublimetext.com/ editor, but unfortunately it works only under Windows.

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Seems a nice start for a program, I wonder what this will turn to in the feature... – Tom Wijsman Sep 10 '10 at 0:38
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I gather that version 2 is available cross platform (Mac/Win/Linux) – intuited Aug 1 '11 at 15:34
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I`ve been using the version 2 beta for a couple of weeks and I'm very satisfied. It's better than Textmate in my opinion and cross platform. – mbillard Nov 16 '11 at 1:07
up vote 2 down vote

If you're going to be using command line, I prefer nano in part because it gives you the keyboard shortcuts at the bottom of the screen and is pretty straight forward to use.

If you're going to be using a graphical text editor, I would recommend Gedit on any platform and Notepad++ on Windows. They both have tabs and text highlighting for your software development.

If you are going to be using an IDE, I prefer Eclipse, but only because I've only really used that one. I have a friend who prefers NetBeans and of course you should probably use Visual Studio if you're developing a Windows application in VC++, VC#, VB.NET etc.

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+1 I love nano. My coworkers are often laughing at me because for the most tasks I prefer nano to vi. – Oliver Weiler May 30 '12 at 8:08
up vote 2 down vote

Sublime Text 2.

Supports Python-based customization, textmate themes and bundles, etc, right out of the box.

Totally multi-platform (linux, win32, osx).

Has an "old school" mode if you're a cracked-out VIM user.

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up vote 0 down vote

I believe that a former coworker of mine liked using nano for coding. Here's a link to the guide.

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Nano is good as an editor, but not as a programming tool. Eg Good at bash, bad at java – TheLQ Sep 10 '10 at 0:29
up vote 0 down vote

I'm a big fan of Komodo Edit for a free cross platform editor with a few IDE features. It also has good Vim keybinding support that can easily be extended. I tend to use it a lot when I ssh into our server at work from my Windows box.

However, I highly recommend learning Vim. You will find yourself using Vim commands everywhere but a lot of programs have Vim support that aren't text editors/IDEs (Vimperator for FF is notable). I would probably use Vim exclusively except for there's no fuse client on Windows that's stable enough to mount the dev server. And I really miss my plugins when I'm using Vim on our dev Unix server.

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up vote 0 down vote

For small to medium sized projects, geany is a very good option.

  • It supports many languages out of the box. Has a very small learning curve.
  • Can be used as a text editor or an IDE.
  • There is no huge overhead of setting up a project as in conventional IDEs, but gives IDE like features with very minimal effort.
  • You can at create geany's version of a tag file and get contextual completion.

You should definitely give geany a try, it gets most of the things right with very minimal effort. It is still no competition for vim or emacs, but the learning curve is very small and the productivity gain is comparatively high.

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up vote -1 down vote

yes any text editor will do the job. maybe some are not as productive or lack some features, but as long as you can load a text file you are good to go.

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