3 Reasons On Why You Need a Text Editor
📅 May 09, 2018
•⏱️3 min read
Why i Hate Text Editors Whenever it comes to text editor, it always makes me cringe because when i first started to learning programming in Java.
I was taught to use window's Notepad to program, it was such a bad experience that it has always stresses me out. Especially whenever you had forgotten to add a curly braces in Java which leads to a lot of errors you had to debug by yourself.
Because of the awful experience that I had with notepad. I had always ignored text editor, Due to the lack of features like syntax highlighting, code complete and my favourite that is debugging which makes programming much easier.
Change of Perception
It's only recently when i had started using Visual Studio code that made me change my perception of text editors.
Now i would happily recommend new programmers to start off using text editors. Especially if they doing web development. So here is the 3 reasons that i believe you should consider using a text editor.
It is Lighting Fast
Most IDEs takes a long time or uses a lot of your computer's resources to be started. Which could be forgiven due to a large amount of features that is catered for professional developers like you and me to be productive in programming.
Let's imagine that you want to amend just a few lines of your code. You would have to wait a few mins for your IDE to start and load for like 1 or 2 mins before you could change your code. It quickly becomes tedious after a few times starting and loading for just a few lines of code.
Extensive Customisation
If your like me that likes to customise your own tool for programming, It's worth to mention that there is a extensive array of plugins that caters to your every need for software development.
From themes that deals with the look and feel of your text editor to the various programming language debuggers that debugs your program without the need to open your terminal.
It's Free
Yes that's right most text editors are free except a few popular text editors that you have to purchase like Sublime Text which could be purchased for less than a few hundred dollars.
If your on a tight budget and you won't want to shell out some cash to buy a IDE software which might cost you a bomb. Using text editors could be a great replacement of a IDE without breaking the bank.
Conclusion
Ok ok i know that you had gotten enough reasons to use text editors. Here's my recommendations of good text editors that you could take it for a spin.
Visual Studio Code
It is one of the newest kid on the block and it is my favourite text editor so far among the various text editors that i had come across especially which i love the most is the IntelliSense that is founded in their commercial IDE.
Sublime Text
It's one of the paid text editors that i had come across so far. One of the old favourites among programmers. It offers a extensive amount of plugins, features and it load much faster than Atom in terms of speed and resources needed.
Atom
Created by Github which focus on being very hackable from the core. With great user interface that allows you to use it without much hassle within a short time. It has been a common text editor for the people at Github.