Editors

One of the things I do every year or so is re-evaluate my tools. I’m a bit of a neophile, and I like to know what’s out there. Text editors/IDEs are one of those things, because I don’t want to just give up and use vim.

(Joke! I’ve known just enough vi/vim since the early 90s to get around. It’s almost always there on UNIXy systems, and it’s handy for configuring a better editor…)

Also, my friends were giving me grief for being a Microsoft hater because I wasn’t willing to check out Visual Studio Code, mostly due to worries about telemetry and accidentally contributing to their idiot LLMs somehow.

Aside - Hating Microsoft

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As a long time computer user and technologist, I’ve spent considerable time using almost everything (although I missed out on Amiga and Acorn somehow). It’s not “just” Microsoft; everything is annoying and has given me lots of stress and irritation over the years.

I do hate Microsoft though. They’ve steam-rollered so many better technologies, and they’ve made all of their software worse (IMHO, your opinion may vary) since the Windows 7 era.

I do miss the Windows 7 era OneNote though, that was an amazing application until it was updated to remove half the features and make the UI terrible.

Editors and IDEs

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I don’t normally use IDEs unless it’s necessary. They always seem too rigid, and I don’t like having things “forcing” me to work a particular way. Also, Xcode once kicked my dog, so that’s right out.

Usually, I want a nice text editor that supports things like syntax highlighting, linting, spell-checking (yeah, even for code), and that generally lets me work the way I want to. In the past I’ve used EMACS (and a bunch of lightweight clones, like MicroEMACS, Jove, and Jed), and weird things like Eddie on BeOS and whatever almost-a-text-editor/almost-a-simple-word-processor I had on the Atari ST.

For the past seven? years, I’ve been using Sublime Text, and it hits all of my text buttons nicely, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much development attention these days. It’s not really missing anything big, and it’s really stable, so this isn’t a big deal, really.

But, like I said, I like to look around, and I like my tools to be under active development. Open Source of some flavour would also be nice.

CudaText

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I saw a post on Mastodon that CudaText had been updated. It’s an open source editor with features similar to Sublime, written in Pascal (which is irrelevant, but interesting).

I couldn’t get it to run on Linux. 🤷 I didn’t try on macOS.

Visual Studio Code

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I found some settings to disable telemetry, so why not, I’ll try Visual Studio Code.

Launched it at work, added those settings, and started mucking around and configuring things. There are a lot of configuration options, which aren’t necessarily documented in a useful way, but I was able to get things the way I like them (i.e. the way I had Sublime set up) pretty quickly, and a version of my favourite Sublime theme (Sunburst) was available.

There isn’t really anything interesting in my settings (which is good), but I’ll describe my extensions and key bindings.

Extensions

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I generally try to install as few add-ons/extensions as possible; here’s what I’ve added to VSCode:

• .NET Install Tool - OK, I didn’t install this, and I’m not sure it even does something useful on macOS and Linux, but I’m mildly afraid to uninstall it in case it breaks something with VSCode or one of the other extensions. I don’t do .NET development these days. It’s possible the Godot extension added it, since C# is supported there.
• C/C++, C/C++ Extension Pack, C++ Themes - I do C sometimes.
• CMake, CMake Language Support, CMake Tools - When I do C, I like to use cmake. Maybe like is a strong word? It’s better than make and scons.
• Code Spell Checker and Canadian English Dictionary - My spelling is traditionally terrible, so here we are. This attempts to be language-aware too, so you can get some useful spell-checking while programming.
• Even Better TOML - Useful but awful alternative to JSON.
• Fish - My favourite shell! Useful when I edit scripts and config files.
• Go - I’m learning Go.
• godot-tools - Godot game engine support, in case I want to try using VSCode as an external editor. The internal editor is fine, but I’m foreseeing a future where my projects are big enough that it’s unmanageable without additional editor power.
• Hugo Language and Syntax Support - Hugo’s an awesome static website generator that I’ve been using.
• markdownlint - Make sure my Markdown is good. I write a lot of Markdown these days.
• Pylance, Python, Python Debugger, Flake8 - Python support. I like Python.
• Ruby LSP - I’ve been meaning to learn Ruby, since it keeps coming up.
• Rust Syntax, rust-analyzer, crates - I’m learning Rust.
• Sunburst Theme - An excellent dark theme that I find very readable.
• YAML - Yet another useful but awful alternative to JSON.

Key Bindings

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Thanks to decades of muscle memory, there are some key bindings I always set up in every editor: EMACS-style Ctrl+A, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+K and Ctrl+Y, and then a replacement for Select All, since that’s usually Ctrl+A. By default, Ctrl+K was set to “delete to end of line”, which is only half way there.

Here’s my set of key bindings, very simple:

// Place your key bindings in this file to override the defaults
[
    {
        "key": "ctrl+e",
        "command": "cursorLineEnd"
    },
    {
        "key": "ctrl+a",
        "command": "cursorLineStart"
    },
    {
        "key": "ctrl+shift+a",
        "command": "editor.action.selectAll"
    },
    {
        "key": "ctrl+y",
        "command": "editor.action.clipboardPasteAction"
    },
    {
        "key": "ctrl+k",
        "command": "runCommands",
        "args": {
            "commands": [
                "cursorEndSelect",
                "editor.action.clipboardCutAction"
            ]
        },
        "when": "textInputFocus && !editorReadonly"
    }
]

A Weekend of Hacking

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I spent some time on Friday afternoon using VSCode, and a weekend working on my website and a Godot/Docker/Codeberg CI demo.

It’s working well, and I actually like the interface. I don’t think I’m quite ready to uninstall Sublime, but I’m going to keep using VSCode this week and see if I run into any pain points.

XBox Huge

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Another reason I didn’t want to give VSCode a chance was Electron; I hate how massive it makes everything, and I’ve got several “must have” Electron apps running already. On the other hand, I have lots of RAM, so why worry?

On Linux right now, VSCode is apparently using somewhere between 1.1GB and 700MB of RAM, which is absolutely insane for a text editor. It seems to fluctuate based on what I’m doing.

Sublime Text is using 88MB of RAM. 🤷