Just wanted to say I find Notepad++ to be an excellent tabbed editor, especially for XML or SQL. I use it on windows all the time and really miss it on OS X where I find Textmate to be a bit awkward.

I've been a long-time fan of Notepad++, but it's a text editor. You can extend it to make it work better with specific programming languages (e.g. here's a post I wrote 10 years ago about adding language support http://weblogs.asp.net/jongalloway/creating-a-user-defined-l...) but it's fundamentally a text editor.

VS Code is a code editor. It has IntelliSense (not text-matched autocomplete, IntelliSense), debugging support, git integration, parameter hints, go to definition, code peek, etc. (http://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/editingevolved). The goal is to give you code editing features with the speed and simplicity of a text editor.

They're both free and lightweight, so I use them both pretty much daily.

Notepad++ is very useful but I wish some features would be updated. The dialogs are awkward to use at times. The XML for defining custom syntax highlighting is atrocious. It's like they took a pre-XML config file and shotgunned tags into it without planning a rational format. Keywords are specified using long strings delimited by CR/LF entities for no good reason other than to destroy readability. It would be nice if an more modern hightlighting engine could be inserted as an alternative to the clunky ad-hoc design it currently has.

As you say, both are useful for different things. They complement each other if you use the right tool for the right job.

I find Notepad++ is great for handling really large files and changing UTF encoding or line endings. VS is good for pretty print formatting code/XML to be more readable, among many other non-text things such as debugging.

>and changing UTF encoding or line endings

If you need to do those things often, there are specialized tools, including in the command line, and for batch processing.

No need to do it in an editor.

I don't need to do this often but occasionally you'll need to fix inconsistent line endings, change encoding to UTF-8 or remove a BOM [0] (to stop  being prefixed by some old software).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Yeah, I know, had to do it some time or another.

In OS X and Linux (and Windows with Cygwin etc) there are several command line programs such as unix2dos (line ending conversion), iconv (encoding conversions) etc for doing just that, so that you don't need to do it in an editor and can even automate the work.

Coming from OS X, there are a bunch of minor things missing in Notepad++ that I'm used to having on OS X. Like the ability to drag tabs between windows with the mouse, to move new tabs to a new window, or to create a new file and immediately save it. The scrolling in Notepad++ is also a little buggy. Just to give you a perspective about what the other side thinks, since you inevitably develop different habits in different editors, and those habits break when you switch.

That said, I use too many editors for my own good. (I'm active in both main churches.) Neither Notepad++ nor TextMate are competitive with VS Code, Emacs, or Vim, IMO, and I use all five regularly.

> Coming from OS X

Also, do Windows editors have that Alt+drag rectangular text selection feature that most/some OS X apps have?

No, it is implemented by each editor/ ide independently with their own modifier.

On the contrary we have mostly consistent ctrl/shift + arrow behaviour over the last 15 or more years(I don't know before that). :-)

> On the contrary we have mostly consistent ctrl/shift + arrow behavior

Are you saying Windows has consistent Control/Shift + arrow behavior?

OS X is pretty consistent about this too, though Control+Arrow moves between Desktop Spaces, not related to text, but you can modify a lot of system/app shortcuts from Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts.

When I had a Mac (2009 - 2012) what modifier to use for different text movement operations varied wildly, even between the built in applications.

Mac using colleagues explained that it was because the applications where written using different toolkits.

Ctrl arrow in Windows jumps by word. In os x, it's option arrow. I believe it's widespread but not global.

I know.

Problem is: until at least 2012 not even Apple was consistent about it.

My most used editors (Sublime Text and Notepad++) have this.

Notepad++ is a great text editor, but it has no clue about your code base. It can't do searches of all functions, or Ctrl+Click on the method to go to its definition, etc.

I dropped Notepad++ for SublimeText a while back (partially because it supports both Windows and Mac). VS Code is slowly winning me over though!

I love ST, but the hotkeys are so different between Windows and Mac and it drives me up the wall. I feel like I'm abroad in the UK and now fries are chips, chips are crisps, crackers are biscuits, Ctrl+H is Cmd+Shift+F, etc... It really gets in the way of my ability to work in my editor fluently, which is ultimately all a text editor is good for.

You're aware that you can change them right?

On OS X, download TextWranger -- it's free and close to Notepad++ than TextMate.

And the best feature of TextWrangler: if it crashes, or the computer shuts down, it remembers unsaved changes in files. Start it up and it restores everything to the last keystroke.

Not sure if other editors do this too.

I'm always surprised that PSPad [1] doesn't get mentioned much in these conversations. I find the built-in utilities are more numerous and work much better than Notepad++. It also handles large files much better IME.

It may be that the customisation is a bit less polished (eg, no way to quickly set themes) and the user community is less developed. But it really does everything and much better than the others IMHO.

[1] - http://www.pspad.com/en/

edit: words

I prefer to install Notepad2, it uses the same engine as Notepad++ (Scintilla), but I have turned off most options to resemble the stock Notepad:

http://imgur.com/vFu51NV

So, apart from the icon, how does that resemble Notepad?

one instance per file, no tabs, no toolbars and a simplified menu (all of that configurable)

I like Notepad++, but I prefer one that works in Windows and in my linux home computer.

Notepad++ does work on Linux and also Mac's using WINE.

Seriously try gvim. Not vim where you need a long ass cheat sheet just to create a new tab or move between splits. But gvim where you can be productive and use the mouse and menus when necessary.

The one thing that kills gvim for me is the inability to have one session with multiple windows. I use it anyway.

Try Emacs with vim bindings and you'll have it, its GUI is a client that connects to a server

How would that be better than opening multiple gvim processes?

I want to type :wa in one window, not four windows. I don't want to get an error message when I try to open a buffer that's already open somewhere else, I want it to just move the buffer to the new window (or alternatively, raise the window containing the buffer). I want to move buffers across windows and keep undo history and register contents. TextMate / Emacs / etc. have this capability, but I can't figure out how to do it in vim.

Agreed that Microsoft has developed a very fine code editor and a worthy competitor to Atom & Sublime.

And if you can believe it, Adobe actually produces a decent code editor: Brackets.

I personally love the way Sublime saves everything in the editor even if you close it and reopen it.

Is it open source? (VSCode)

Wikipedia: "Visual Studio Code is an open source source code editor"

Yes sir: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

How do corporate developers test and debug things without the root password? In some cases, you need to be able to start Visual Studio in UAC mode, and debug an already running process...

From a security perspective, we ask: why are you developing applications that can't be ran by normal users?

For the 1% of devs working on system level stuff we provide VMs or separate physical servers that aren't joined to the corporate domain and don't have sensitive information on them.

As an example, VS needs UAC permission to integrate with a local IIS install, so there's a big group of .NET-based web developers that really need it with such a setup.

But honestly, giving a developer non-admin privileges of their own (as in their work environment) computer is like giving a carpenter a rubber hammer to hammer nails. I find it insulting.

At a lot of workplaces (like mine) it goes beyond that - developers aren't allowed to install software even under their own user account, where admin privs aren't needed.

Consider the irony of that, when one of the approved pieces of software is a compiler. We can make our own programs, hello!?

> From a security perspective, we ask: why are you developing applications that can't be ran by normal users?

Really? This question from a security engineer on Hacker News? I can tell you've never developed on Windows because (as pointed out) Visual Studio needs root level permissions to operate. The level of access a user needs to run my program has nothing to do with the level of access I need to build the program. They are completely disjoint.

I'm sorry but you are incorrect. VS needs admin rights to install into Program Files, registry updates and GAC install, etc. Otherwise the apps a developer builds are run in in their own process and unless there are special circumstances, should not need admin privs; VS should never be run as admin apart from those special circumstances.

What about tools like Docker or VirtualBox? Every time those high-frequency release software are updated, you need to request sudo using the audit tool or request for IT to update?

I can't even imagine writing a kernel hardware driver in a corporate setup if they at subjecting development environments to strict lockdown.

I worked in a bank previously. We did not have root, but we had a utility to run certain commands "as administrator". It popped up a dialog where you had to input a justification for auditing purposes.

I don't recall needing it for debugging though, even when attaching to a running process (was your process started as a different user?)

We either don't need it, or get stuck and end up crying in the bathroom.

Thing is, why do developers create software that needs administrative access to the os? I wish that I could simply download a zip of the software, extract it and run.

And already this wouldn't work: most software is distributed only through an installer. Heck, even PortableApps website distribute their portable products using an installer!

You generate a time limited root password alongside a reason why are you requesting it.

This applies to any OS being used.

If you are an external, might additionally need to have an employee sitting with you in case you are trying to use something business critical.

I have no idea. I work for a very large software company and we all have root.

Which is to be expected since your core business is software. I work for a very large consulting company and I also have administrative access. But my client's machine do not - big insurance companies, banks, publishers, Telcos, petrochemicals, etc.

Why? Tell me, if you were a system's administrator in charge of 10.000+, would you risk it? That's everything that's bad in corporate culture, but as you get big, it happens.

> Atom: [...] must install a column mode extension

Atom has Sumblime-Text-style column selection using (on Win) CTRL-ALT; it works very well and feels familiar for people coming from Sublime Text (which has been very popular for years now).

Actually, column selection is one of the things where I prefer Atom to VS Code (I love both editors for different reasons).

But maybe you needed some particular style of column selection?

This just works if you have a package installed. It's where your problems start.

Weird, I don't recall installing it, but my case might be atypical since I have been continuously updating since beta.

If you have Powershell 3+ try http://scoop.sh/ at work. You can install many tools (including VSCode) from the command line.

Or Chocolatey ( https://chocolatey.org/ )

Nope, you need to (correctly) use chocolatey, since most things are installed.

My last attempt at this was to install kdiff on a corporate machine

Curious if you've tried Sublime Text and your thoughts about using it in a corporate environment?

I've been using Sublime Text 3 for probably 2-3 years now at work (and home) and I love it. The only downside is it costs money but you can use it for free as long as you don't mind a popup asking you to purchase it every 10-20 saves.

I used Notepad++ for a few years before Sublime, I eventually switched because of the lack of Notepad++ support on Linux. I didn't want to have to remember the commands/shortcuts for two editors (and I avoid using Vim if I can).

My company now freely buys any employee a license, if they want one. Quite a few did and got a license.

I'm not really sure how a half-IDE/half-editor intersects with corporate concerns, to be honest.

> To quickly test a new general code editor I just want 3 "simple" things: column selection, regexp search and replace, and a python mode.

What do you mean by python mode? Just syntax highlighting or something more advanced like an integrated REPL?

To me (not OP), Python mode means syntax highlighting, code linting, code completion, and unit test integration from within the editor.

There's a few other nice-to-haves, but those are the big ones.

In a simple text editor? My requirement would just be that copy/paste does intelligent things with indents.

In Sublime, Paste and Indent (Shift-Cmd-V on Mac) does that fairly well. It's not based on an AST or anything like that, but it's rarely failed to do the right thing in my experience with these: Python, XML, HTML, CSS, SASS, PowerShell, YAML, Ruby

For me, it's a robust extension API, because then I can have any feature I want given enough time. Atom definitely has an edge there imo. Performance is also a plus (I have no complaints there with Atom). VSCode looks promising, though.

Well, I can do this in vim, so... yeah. If it can't do these things (more specifically be extended to do these things), it's a text editor I'd quickly put down for one which can.

> To quickly test a new general code editor I just want 3 "simple" things: column selection, regexp search and replace, and a python mode.

FWIW since you mention Notepad++, Zeus is another Windows based programmer's editor with those three features.

"I belong to a lower race: the corporate developer. I work in a Windows 7 machine, don't have root password and there's a big wall called proxy around me"

Sounds like an undeserving environment for a developer. Why not vote with your feet?

I live in Brazil. We have some striving software houses, but they are few and pay a lot less than, say, my employer, Bigtime Consulting.

To vote with my feet I'd have to accept an income downgrade of about 30%, higher risk of unemployment, and even then (heck, I'm looking for something like this right now) it's hard to find.

Because not everyone wants 20% below market rate, consntant negotiation headaches on stock dilution, an "infinite" vacation policy that actually means none, or being part of a culture that expects 70+ hour work weeks as normal, 3 months of maternity leave being ruinous to the company, etc.

It's a tradeoff, for sure.

But also most companies are waking up to the notion that trusted network models are not effective. It just takes time to change.

Ugh. 'Infinite' vacation policies are starting to infect corporaculture. I work for a megacorp (that I actually rather enjoy working for) that recently went this way, and since my megacorp is a bit of a trend setter, you can expect it to spread. During the explanation meeting, it was made clear that we really aren't supposed to take more vacation than what we used to have, but that we are expected to still actually take about as much vacation as we used to have ... so essentially a no-change there. As far as I can tell, it's mostly about

1) Making it so that employees can't take vacation at times that are particularly bad for a project because they're 'entitled' to it. This was already frowned upon (we always did get to use our vacation eventually, so it wasn't so bad), but now it's in writing -- which is good, rules should be written.

and, more importantly to the megacorp: 2) Eliminating owed vacation from their books & marginally reducing cost. Now if somebody quits or is canned, they're not owed a payout. I'm guessing the average employee will probably also take a couple of days less than they did under the old system, yielding a further savings.

I'm glad I live in a country where it's illegal not to pay out unused leave entitlements upon termination, and where there is a sensible statutory minimum leave entitlement...

I'm in a corporate environment too. The work is interesting and I'm slowly working with IT Security to break down the walls where needed, but I still find myself submitting bug reports like:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/msysgit/B31LNftR4BI

https://github.com/abbr/NodeSSPI/issues/10

https://github.com/abbr/NodeSSPI/issues/9

(Note that I've since found out it's better to support SSPI and NEGOTIATE)

That's before we even get started with SSL interception -npm/node and possibly Ruby's gem don't use the system cert list.

The answer is not to vote with my feet (because there are lots of reasons to stay) but work to make things better for developers in more restricted environments. Geez, wait til you startup kids go work for the Government one day ;)

Just because SV is an employee's market that doesn't mean that everywhere is, or that everybody has a lot of mobility in their personal life.

Because my country has a 20% unemployment rate and a 50% unemployment rate for youth such as me?

If the developer needs access, the product will suffer for a lack of it, and customers will eventually leave. If not, then it's just a petty complaint.

A lot of people don't want a bloated editor with too much bundled in by default. I'd be incredibly frustrated if there was some vertical selection functionality built in if it caused issues with a Vim mode extension.

Like a full web browser, for example?

cntlm for the win. I don't know how I could do my job behind our corporate proxy without it.

Googled part of this for you:

>Why not just set up atom to use your existing corporate proxy?

"Many of these text editors support proxy servers, but none of them that I have tried support NTLM for authentication and if your corporate proxy is using NTLM they simply cannot connect to it. Or lets say not directly! Actually the only solution I have found is to use a software called CNTLM that can act as a proxy server itself and behind the scene it can connect to another proxy server that is using NTLM." [1]

As to what needed a compiler, that part I'm not sure about. Aren't Atom extensions generally in javascript? Could it have been the CNTLM installer that wanted a compiler?

[1] https://devinthefastlane.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/how-to-ins...

NTLM auth is but one of various other roadblocks in a corporate environment.

In my previous job, the company runs a MITM proxy, it broke SSL checks for package managers. You ended up having to disable SSL checks and load up company-issued certs.

I asked whether we can find a solution to this issue on the company forum, as there are other developers and data analyst whose life can be made easier if this just works, the response I get was: "just download them manually", I kid you not.

Sigh... corporate proxies are the worst software I ever had to deal with. Terrible for productivity. Enough that people bring in own 3g dongles and connect to that wifi instead. Whole audit/security defeated :(

I thought they were, but the simple installation of the column select mode failed with a message of missing compiler. I don't want to delve inside my editor internals.

The first difficult thing is to discover that I have to install the sublime-style-column-selection package. So it failed and didn't researched more.

Ops, I've just tried it to see the error message and it worked! The sysadmins just updated a lot of Windows patches, maybe it solved the problem. BTW: VSCodes starts a lot quicker than Atom.

Coffeescript compiler?

Please report issues instead of using things like CNTLM - it has at least one bug that causes crashes under heavy traffic and may require you to store your password/hash in an insecure way.

I have admin and can install anything locally, but also I can't get any Atom packages to install from behind our proxy. That's okay -- I just wait until I have my laptop on my WiFi network at home and everything is copacetic.

It's not just me -- we had a trainer giving a class, & this guy lived and breathed Atom and he couldn't install an updated version of an existing package from our network either. His solution was to tether his phone.

I have the same problem with the Atom packages behind the proxy. I had to do some npm and git configuration to add http_proxy. It worked for a bit, then the corporate password changed, and I never really updated the buried settings.

I'll probably have a pretty easy time getting the MSFT Visual Studio Code approved for machine installation for devs on my team, even though we're an Eclipse/Java shop. I've been trying to get everyone normalized on a JavaScript editor, since the tools we have in Eclipse are severely lacking.