I used Vim for a really long time, but then got a job at a company that uses Emacs + Slime really saw the light.
Emacs is an amazing program, but really is awful without EVIL/Paredit. I don't really like the commands chaining and actually find it hurts my wrists after a day in Emacs mode. If anyone has any advice on how to maximize emacs I would love to hear them!
This allows you to use the relatively strong thumbs to activate the commonly used ctrl key. I now use a Kinesis advantage pro which similarly allows the thumbs to activate many commonly used keys.
Tried it years ago and absolutely hated it, then last year I saw a screenshot of someone's org-mode setup and thought I'd give it another go. Since then it's become my main editor for coding, project organization, diet tracking and more.
I'm not ashamed to admit I spend most of my coding time with Notepad++ — I suppose I'm not a "real" programmer. I think I'll most likely switch to Sublime Text eventually though, if nothing else because of its cross OS compatibility; I just have to find some time to test if everything I use on npp is there on Sublime Text aswell.
I made the switch from Notepad++ to Sublime Text recently. Sublime Text feels quite a bit more polished and was easier to get it setup to fit my needs. Definitely recommend giving it a try.
Sorry for the late response. I cant recall anything that I missed from NotePad++. Once I was all set up in ST2 (which was super quick thanks to the package installer), everything felt the similar.
I used Emacs for 11 years, but gave it up in 2004 for wily/acme-sac/acme. Now I use Acme (running in hosted Inferno) to edit all text files, mostly shell scripts and notes. My favorite shell dialect is Inferno's sh. My favorite text stream editor is sed (because I can use it in scripts), followed by the sam-like Edit command in Acme.
I have many favorite languages for different tasks, because I don't try to make one language do everything, and it takes less time and effort to make a language do things for which it was designed.
My favorite functional language is Haskell, my favorite systems language is Go (I should do more Limbo programming in Inferno), and my favorite object-oriented language is Ruby.
My favorite production-dependency-management language is my own build tool credo, followed by Plan 9's mk.
My favorite document language is UTF-8, followed by LaTeX if I actually have to make it look pretty.
I mostly do ASP.NET MVC development, so I use Visual Studio 2010 + 2012 with a bunch of plugins daily. I also bought a bunch of other IDE's on JetBrains' end of of the world sale including Intellij Idea, WebStorm, RubyMine and PyCharm. I have found they are a lot slower than VS 2012. I haven't worked with Eclipse/Netbeans in over a year. Other than that I usually use Notepad++ daily and I really like SublimeText - I've used it on trial, but haven't bought a license yet. I also use Microsoft Management Studio for T-SQL, otherwise one of the aforementioned text editors. A couple of months ago I was hacking away on Ubuntu and found Geany - which is actually pretty good for what you pay for (free). CodeBlocks on windows is not bad either. It might be a good idea to specify language of choice with preferred IDE if that's what you're after :)
"I also bought a bunch of other IDE's on JetBrains' end of of the world sale including Intellij Idea, WebStorm, RubyMine and PyCharm"...RubyMine and PyCharm are IntelliJ plugins, check them out before dropping $$ on the license upgrade.
I'm using Aptana, a PHP centric variation of Eclipse.
It's great at matching parenthesis, braces and brckets, provides popup tips on commands and functions (including defined) as you code, can customize syntax highlighting, does some proactive error checking and the file manager is good. Doesn't do upload well.
Used to use Quanta Plus - what I miss from that was the better speed, drag and drop tags (drop an image from your tree into your source - instant img tag.) Better PHP example popups, easier color tag editing, nice preview/WYSIWYG editor pane and decent printout (aptana printing is formatted lousy, and sublime is literally non-existent) And better file transport (pre KDE 4)
IntelliJ, for almost everything...best $50 I ever spent.
Seriously, Java, PHP and even my first Rails project.
Missing my favorite MVC framework(CI) for PHP though.
Are you anticipating a sale soon? I've been eyeing IntelliJ IDEA for a while, but only expect to use it for hobby projects so I'm having a problem justifying the full cost. I do need some of the features in the Ultimate edition to make it worthwhile, too.
Unfortunately I can't gauge that at all. They don't pre-announce, I got my license of IntelliJ last December...I discovered the news here. I think they have a twitter acct which you can subscribe to, and they mention sales on that.
I just converted to Sublime Text 2, using the "Vintage Mode" VI keybindings. I'm still missing a few things, but the "Vintage Ex" package and a handful of custom key overrides have gotten me pretty close to an ideal VI environment. Sublime Text is extremely customizable.
My favorite language is C, but I'm doing mainly web front-end work now.
Textwrangler and vim. I'm looking to move to sublime eventually, but my needs aren't overly complex and I'd rather not spend the effort switching at the moment.
I waste maybe 1-5% of my time on inefficiencies regarding my editor. It's a low priority decision to me.
C#: Visual Studio 2012, obviously.
Java: Eclipse
Everything else: Sublime Text 2. Super powerful, customisable, a lot of packages, relatively quick learning curve. What's not to like!
Favourite language...either Javascript or C# at the moment. Not even kidding.
PyCharm and WebStorm for python and javascript/coffeescript respectively, matlab IDE for matlab, Visual Studio for the one C++ library i sometimes have to touch, Sublime text for just about everything else.
Emacs is an amazing program, but really is awful without EVIL/Paredit. I don't really like the commands chaining and actually find it hurts my wrists after a day in Emacs mode. If anyone has any advice on how to maximize emacs I would love to hear them!