[todd8]

Sublime Text is pretty and fairly easy to use. I own a copy. However, I would seriously recommend that you take the time to learn Vim or Emacs. I've used both, extensively, and can recommend either without reservation. They have slightly different strengths and weaknesses that lead to endless comparisons, but neither one would be a mistake to learn and use as your primary development editor. I currently use Emacs.

Both Emacs and Vim require an investment in time to become productive. The break even point, where using the new editor is finally not too frustrating to use, is a few days for either one. Make that investment in time. After a few weeks the power that these editors provide will start to open up, and after a year, you will feel like no other tool for editing that can touch what you can do with these thoroughly professional tools. If you care about your craft, take the dive and learn a first class tool. They are open source and run on almost anything.

[eliah-lakhin]

Hm... What can you say about Textadept? For the first glance it seems like a good alternative with lesser entry barriers. At least comparing with vanilla vim and emacs.

[todd8]

Thanks for pointing out Textadept. I'm going to take a look at it. Lua seems almost ideal as an extension language, and it would be a more familiar language than Emacs Lisp for most programmers. I want to look at what Textadept does about Unicode; Lua doesn't yet support it very well (although there are libraries for using Unicode).

It would still be beneficial to learn Vim or Emacs. The scale and breadth of add-ons for these environments is staggering. This makes getting started seem difficult, but one can simply focus on learning the basics (which are all that are offered by most competing editors). There are good tutorials for both Vim and Emacs built into the editors. It will only take an hour or so to go through one and learn the keys and commands for straightforward editing.

Another way to get started would be to start with a stripped down emacs. Although I use GNU Emacs, there are simpler implementations. I like mg. Its a micro-emacs that supports most of Emacs's common commands, but has no extensibility. It's definitely not a toy, and might provide a nice stepping stone to full GNU Emacs. It runs in a terminal, starts up instantly, and has a small footprint. On a Mac, I install it with homebrew. Microemacs is the editor reported to be used by Linus Torvalds.