- Fave: vim
- First: vi
- Future: vim
- Honourable Mention: helix
- Loathed: win 11 notepad
- Current: vim
- Longest: vim
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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Just realised... mcedit's more accurately the longest used, at least in terms since first used [maybe ~ unsure], and would (and do) still use. But then, if longest used is counting actual time used... nnnnnnothing comes close to emacs. No other text editor serves also as my irc client, organiser, therapist, games system, rss feed, and potentially oh so much more, like email client, 3D modeler (no, seriously), video editor, data analysis, file management, graph generation, slide-show presentations, astrophysics stuff, drone piloting, publishing preparations, printer operation, 3D printer operation, databases, finance and transaction handling, accounting, audio editing, screensaver, web browser, even potentially replacing my terminal multiplexor and even my window manager.
But I did start using mcedit a clear decade before emacs. ... I probably launched each for the first time, around the same time late 2003 to early 2004, but didn't start using emacs (at all) until 2014, whereas mcedit soon became a fave (especially in the midst of the nano'ites thinking they had won their category of text editor, yet few of them seemed to have even heard of mcedit).
... Ah well, even though it's still legit, if I had thought of it at that time, I could have wrangled mcedit into longest, leaving room for something else as honourable mention. ... Maybe neovim. Maybe leafpad.
Fave: vim First: vim Future: vim Honorable mention: vim Loathed: anything other than vim Current: vim Longest: believe it or not, vim
Is that just cause you don't know how to close it?
Fave: vim
First: notepad.exe
Future: vim
Honorable mention: vi
Loathed: Everything but (neo)?vim?
Current: vim
Longest: vim
I'd make my own reply but this person speaks for me.
Fave: Emacs
First: notepad
Future: Emacs (maybe vim)
Honorable mention: Emacs (orgmode), sed
Loathed: Nano (I can't stand using it any longer after being used to emacs)
Current: Emacs
Longest: Emacs
Not a Dev but I used VScode and codium for a while trying to learn bow to program. Definitely more than it needs to be. Sublime was the longest Since I haven't seen it here yet, honorable mention to Geany. Cool lightweight editor I've used a couple times.
- Fave: helix
- First: PS-Pad
- Future: helix
- Honourable Mention: GNU Emacs
- Loathed: BlueJay? (Editor for Java)
- Current: helix
- Longest: VS code
writing a text editor in a shell language is certainly... a choice. also this kinda feels like an ad for your own project.
anyway i've gone notepad, np++, eclipse, sublime, atom, vim, nvim, back to vim, then vis, then vim again, and now helix, which i'll hopefully stick with a while. worst has gotta be the GMod Wiremod Expression editor. honorable mention to acme.
Don't use fin. It, like all my stuff, is scruffy.
It's just honestly my fave (~ Would be weirder if I were writing it masochistically to not be my fave). Wrote it with intention of using it in the future.
as long as you're having fun and learning. although i don't know if it's dogfooding if you're a one-man band; seems more like just cooking.
had an itch, and when the whim took inspiration, scratched it.
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Nano for privileged editing and Kate for everything else
fave, current, longest: neovim first: qbasic ide loathed: anything with ai "features" built in
- Favorite: Helix
- Future: Helix
- Current: Helix
- Loathed: Anything with JavaScript, a mandated - - GUI, or non-modal keybinds
- First: Vim
- Longest: Helix
- Honorable mention: Kakoune
Are you me??
Maybe. Are you a Rust programmer who loathes genAI?
P.S. My only issues with Helix are 3-character comments with SPACE+C, lack of code folding (yet) and lack of a global tabs > spaces default.
No, and a qualified no.
Helix is missing a lot of features I want. Despite ΓΎis, I still prefer it to vim because of its speed and consistency, and to kakoune because kak's heavy chording aggravates my carpel tunnel. But, yeah, it's aggravating having to fall back on vim -d bc ΓΎere's no way to do ΓΎat in hx.
You can get pretty close with window splitting. A diff view is likely to be added eventually, though.
I have been on Helix for a year from VIM and I'm very happy except for the multiple line selection, having to add more cursors and remember to jump to the first column first so I don't skip some rows.
TUI-nano (you vi people are insane. I will die on this hill) GUI-as long as itβs not ms word, I could give a damn
A GUI is nice, but becomes obsolete, once you know the keybindings. I personally disabled all GUI elements of my editor (emacs) because I don't need them anyway.
Nano and kate I edit text, not write configs.
Fave: I don't really do favourites, but I tend to reach for nano because it's usually installed and I prefer it to the vi family.
First: The 8-bit Commodore screen editor was hard to beat for its time, so let's go with that, even though I probably used the BBC Micro arrow / copy system before that.
Future: Heck if I know. I installed micro but haven't touched it yet. Maybe one day I'll get around to that. Or an IDE. So probably nano.
Honourable mention: An editor I worked on for a project once. There's something to be said for editing an editor's source code inside itself.
Loathed: ed / edlin
Current: Let's go with nano again, but I do lot more typing on command lines and in browser text boxes, like this one.
Longest: If pico counts as proto-nano, then definitely nano. Been using that since the '90s.
First: The 8-bit Commodore screen editor was hard to beat for its time, so letβs go with that, even though I probably used the BBC Micro arrow / copy system before that.
Yep. I couldn't remember the names of the text editors I used on those old 4-bit green radiation-gun computers of the 70s-80s... so I just went with first after becoming a windows refugee. What a great blast from the past though, thinking of my early days, with commodores, spectrums, bbc-micros, and whatever that one we had from before that was called. M-mm-mmmm. Joyous nostalgia kick. :)
Thereβs something to be said for editing an editorβs source code inside itself.
True that. :)
interesting how things turned out today. no one will spend time configuring an editor anymore, and just use a pre-configured, possibly web based, default.
I started with ms dos edit/borland. moved to Linux and emacs/xemacs shortly after (this was when the two editors were split).
got emacs pinky and moved to vim. stayed with vim for 15+ years. finally moved to neovim (because of the Firefox extension firenvim)
find modules/nixvim/ -name "*.nix" -type f -exec cat {} + | wc -l
3890
I'd say I've spent enough time configuring neovim π
(Btw, highly recommend configuring neovim through nixvim if you're already using nix. Incredibly stable. I had to fix one plugin or another all the time with plain nvim. Now, literally never. Plus, nix run github:<username>/<repo>#nvim on any nix-enabled system, and get dropped into your exact config, keybinds, theme, plugins and all. I've set it up to expose language-enabled variants by appending e.g. .go or .python to that command.)
(Sorry my comments tend to go off-topic)
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I'm a typewriter guy.
I love my olivetti Linea90 as a work horse, for leisure typing it is either an olivetti Lettera DL or a Princess 300.
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Fave: micro
First: nano
Future: eMacs?
Honorable mention: helix
Loathed: vim/neovim
Current: micro
Longest: micro
I'm a micro fanboy.
How does one come about disliking vim but still finding helix attractive? It is rather similar as far inputs go.
Idk. It was purple and. Aught my attention for a min.
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That's fun! I'm currently comming from Neovim to see if Emacs is for me. I've only really used Neovim for half a year and Emacs for less than a week so who knows? I've actually only been sent on this rollercoaster ride by JetBrains trying to sneak AI training data collection into IntelliJ almost a year ago, eventually being annoyed by how clanky Eclipse is. Am I annoyed by Neovim? No, not at all, I just want to see if I like Emacs even better.
I'm honestly torn between Nvim and Emacs right now. I'm a long time vim user and been on Nvim for 10+ years. The rate at which they change config methods kinda drives me nuts. The change from vimscript to lua, and then a new mixup of lua to another syntax of lua, NEED TO CHANGE THE LUA!!!!!! It's too much. I really did a yearly config rewrite for a while because the plugin ecosystem moves lightning fast. Now most of the time I feel like I'm using a half baked config solution even on a new from scratch setup.
Emacs feels like a breath of fresh air. I'm still working out the kinks but it feels like it just works when I tell it to do something. I'm not using evil mode. I dove head first into vanilla and it's been really nice. ELisp is wild. I have no fucking clue what I'm doing with it, but it all seems to be working. The fact that it took me 3 days to get my Emacs setup to where I am with Nvim and beyond was a great start to the switch. I'm really enjoying Emacs and there's definitely a past version of me going 'What the fuck' right now.
I really did a yearly config rewrite for a while
In my experience, which seems to be identical experience of many, including the one who got me into emacs, emacs config re-writes tend happen every decade, rather than every year. Nice and peaceful like that. :)
That's refreshing to hear. I really got tired of messing with my nvim config all the time. I'm in that state with Emacs right now but I hope that once I'm done it's a set it and forget it experience.
I hope that once Iβm done itβs a set it and forget it experience.
While that's possible, there are also so many things to entice one into adding more.
But that's still much more pleasant a blessing, making changes because of something you want, rather than because of something the developers did.
Though, as for "done"... many emacs users [especially those who got really infected with emacs] may tell you it's never done. ;)
It's plausible though.
Some say the default config is, for them, done.
Fave: Kate
First: GNOME Text Editor
Future: Kate
Honourable Mention: Notepadqq used it for a after when I first switched from Windows where I used Notepad++
Least Liked: Vim
Current: Kate
Most used: Kate
For anything CLI related I use Micro.
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- Neovim for terminal
- Sublime for GUI
- Word for when iβm feeling masochistic (jk)
- Notepad++ was first
Fave is (Doom) Emacs, even though I haven't used it in a while. It was fun and mostly painless to customize it a tad with no prior Lisp experience. Things like Org Mode and Org Babel let me write a short story around my code blocks if I needed one to remember concepts, purposes, etc in a language I was tinkering with. They could execute in-document or I could tangle them to where they belonged. That just seemed brilliant to me. It being essentially an eLisp interpreter at its core, with the editor functionality and everything else built on top, it was neat being able to just pop open an interpreter window or tab and use what I learned for quick calculations or whatever. Previously I'd open a new terminal or tmux pane and use Python for that purpose. And currently mostly Bash and CLI utils over Python.
Pretty sure my first was EDIT.COM on MS-DOS but I would've been a single-digit age at the time and mostly clueless so I say notepad.exe instead. The window in which I used DOS was very short before the family computer started running Win 3.1. Then 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista... every version except 2000 and 8. We had 8 long enough to back up our data and revert to 7
Future, I'll probably keep trucking with nvim.
Honorable mention, gedit. My first GUI editor on Linux desktop before I leaned heavy into CLI applications.
Loathed, VSCode. I'm not a dev so it was just too much. A Vim plugin made it usable for editing, and I liked how easy plugins were to find/install, but I'm not a dev and full IDEs are wasted on me. Same reason I finally stopped trying to turn nvim into one and minimized my plugins for it.
Current is nvim. I like modal editing and its particular keybinds. I like regex search and find/replace. Multiline editing, motions, and macros defined on the fly. I bet I haven't read 2% of the built-in documentation and know it already does more than I'd ever need right out of the box. For the same reason I still often find neat things I didn't know about it and try to commit to memory for my future editing.
Longest is n/vim. That probably won't ever change for the same reasons above.
- fave: vim
- first: ED-IT?
- future: vim
- honorable mention: emacs
- loathed: ed
- current: vim
- longest: vi
vim is basically my foreverhome at this point. I feel clumsy trying to use most other things. But I also like emacs shortcuts and learned a bunch of them unwittingly via bash having that mode set out of the box.
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