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| title | tags | date | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code Editors |
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2023-09-07 |
CBelow are my two favorite ways to write code. Let's start with the big one:
Visual Studio Code
This little gem of a text editor ended up taking the world by storm because it delivered open-source compartmentalization and configuration in an enterprise package.
VSCode arose out of a common hatred for the Visual Studio IDE, which follows the Windows design philosophy and, as a result, is a bloated and unusable mess.
Instead of the "workload", where Visual Studio installs everything needed to develop a certain kind of application, VSCode offers the "extension": all the IDE features and syntax highlighting needed to develop in a language, but leaves language servers and compilers to the rest of your system. As such, it's extremely lightweight, not to mention cross-platform thanks to its use of the Electron framework.
Another of the features that I like is cosmetic customization. VSCode has a massive
Neovim
Sometimes, the Misc/keys only arises because it was technically necessary, yet when advancements make it no longer necessary, the initial route proves subpar. you just want to bang out a few lines of code, hit save, and go back to whatever you were doing before. This is Neovim.
Based on the older vim text editor (which was in turn based on vi, the linux-isms#BSD Unix program), Neovim is designed to be as minimally intrusive as possible while remaining responsive to the needs of a developer.
This does come with a high learning curve, as Neovim is a modal text editor. vi was created in the days that a computer was simply a circuit board, a keyboard, and a CRT monitor; no fancy peripherals like a "mouse" or a "touch screen". As such, it needed to be usable in such a non-user-friendly environment.
Neovim has three commonly used modes (among others):
- Normal mode: for navigating throughout the file and using any of the MANY power-user keyboard shortcuts to rapidly modify the file. This mode is the reason that modal text editors are so powerful, as well as so arcane.
- Insert mode: This one is most familiar to those that use Notepad on Windows, or any of the similar Linux/Mac programs. It's just a normal text editor, type letters/numbers/punctuation and navigate with the arrow keys.
- Visual mode: For selecting blocks of text and doing things with a selected block like cutting it to paste somewhere else.
In Normal mode, you can tell Neovim what to do by giving it commands. By default, you start a command with the colon. I shouldn't tell you this, but typing :q from Normal mode and pressing Enter will exit the program, because q is the Quit command. Misc/linux-isms#On Acronyms.
I'm a believer in the principle that your computer should adapt to you, so I often find myself writing tiny little files around Projects/my-computer that I don't want to open VSCode to edit. I just open a terminal (if I'm not already working in one), pull up the path, type the file name, make my changes, and done. It's quick, it's easy, and (my favorite) it's free.
- To speed the process of opening a terminal, I recommend a dropdown terminal (also called a "quake-style" terminal). The aim is that when you press a keyboard shortcut (Alt+backtick for me), it opens a terminal. I've used both Guake and a docked tabby-terminal for the same end. Still on the fence over which I like more.
Neovim can be installed on all platforms. If you'd like to get started, open it with nvim and use the command :Tutor.