Now I’m wondering who uses what development tools. I mostly use Qt Creator myself - I chose it because of its good integration with C++ and Qt projects, and I’m just used to it. On Linux I use Qt Creator, and on Windows I use Visual Studio. I wonder what others use? VSCode, Vim, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDE, Emacs, Sublime or something more rare?
- Why did you decide to use them specifically?
- What do you like or annoy you about it?
- How usable is it in real work?
KEIL, because I develop embedded systems.
Depends.
Mostly vscodium with a pinned c/++ plugin 'cos M$ eee’d it. It’s a fairly decent IDE and I have basic needs.
And vim, although not pimped enough (yet).Kate/Kwrite.
Emacs since it’sa trojan horse for an operating system on an operating system.
Eclipse for the behemoth that runs most of the company and the collection of microservices; IntelliJ or Webstorm for front-end depending on the project; QT Creator for personal Python projects on Linux, Visual Studio for personal .NET projects on Windows. VS Code is a wildcard that I use more as a text editor than an IDE.
VSCode because I’m too lazy to learn Vim and I’m not enough of a masochist to configure emacs.
Spacemacs. I learned some keybinds for vim but don’t want to have to configure everything to the tee and add everything myself. Spacemacs seems to hit the spot for most stuff. For debugging I sometimes fall back to vscode.
Vim because it’s ubiquitous, starts up instantly, works when ssh’d into a server, and doesn’t get in my way with lots of busy interface. Also modal editors are the only way to go, IMHO. 🙂
Neovim, because I wanted something that would not just disappear.
I never really got along with VSCode, opting for Atom instead. Microsoft bought GitHub, which owned Atom, and promptly discontinued it.
Nvim has such an active community (and no “owner”) that I’m certain that this won’t happen again. At the same time, the plugin system is so flexible that I’m also certain that I will never miss out on any shiny new features.
Over the years, my config has matured, and is mine. The thought of going back to an editor, any editor, less flexible in its configuration than nvim is just… an absolute “no”.
It’s a steep learning curve, but well worth it.
I use Emacs. I used to really love Neovim but it breaks too often and I can’t get myself to write my own configs. I tried all other Neovim alternatives (Kakoune, Helix,…) but they were all pretty immature. At the end, I learned to use Emacs and has been a happy user since.
I like Emacs because it is very extensible and IMHO it is easier to config than Neovim :) Emacs has a very large plugin repository so code integration is not a problem. I have been more productive since the switch. I think it got me addicted to programming, not gonna lie…
VSCodium bcus AI coding extensions
Visual Studio Code, I think it’s just the best, works on all platforms and there’s extensions for literally everything. If it enshittifies too much with e.g. copilot, etc. there’s always vscodium instead.
If I’m on a linux terminal, I use the micro editor. I can survive using vim if nothing else is available, but yeah, I used to be in emacs team back in the day…
I have used Qt Creator in the past and, while it was pretty good back then, nowadays I’m not sure if it can compete with vscode, I haven’t kept up with its development.
I use Zed Yeah the agentic ai feature is nice and all but I don’t use it much. However the whole speed of it and the layout of the ui is very close to my heart eg.: native remote server connection or you can hide stuff away to be distraction free. Tldr.: feels nice, looks nice
Never heard of Zed, trying it out now… I"m not sure I’ve ever seen such a responsive GUI app. Crazy.
Haha right? My first reaction exactly. Written in rust so that’s that. Oh forgot yo mention the collab features almost equally amazing
Interesting, never heard of it before but looks promising, I should try it. I don’t care much for AI features, but I’m not against it either, especially if I can use locally hosted models, and it seems Zed supports ollama natively, so that fits the bill.
Coming from vscode, one of the features I use a lot is devcontainers, does Zed support something similar?
emacs
has been with me since the 16-bit era, across paradigms, across generations, across careers. When I useemacs
I think in terms of what the elisp is doing. It’s such a deep and developed relationship, I would be throwing away so much personal power to use anything else.I decided to use it because it was written in Rust which seems a bit weird but I always found Rust-based softwares to be awesome. Also, it’s FOSS, extension-based and most important, it’s not VSCode.
Pros: its speed, stability, memory usage (~200M, which seems a lot for a texte editor, but then again I come from VSCode) fast development cycles (a whole Git interface was added recently), extensions for nearly every language, refactoring capabilities, opt-in AI agent (can be a self-hosted LLM).
Cons: not a fully-featured IDE like IntelliJ, Git client is missing features, some frameworks are not supported by extensions
I tried to use it for several projects -->
- Works well: Rust, Go, VanillaJS, SolidJS (since it’s using JSX/TSX, React should work too), Vue
- I prefer another IDE: Angular, anything JVM related (Java, Kotlin), anything Android-related