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In Search of the Text Editor

I've been programming since late 2011. Absolutely fell in love with it. As things started to get more and more interesting, one thing was clear, a programmer needs a text editor built for programming.
I was introduced to Vim in our college and I hated it! I didn't like the modal mechanism of Vim. Ubuntu comes pre-installed with gEdit. It's a simple text editor with not many bells and whistle. It has syntax highlighting which helps and programmer a lot. It could've been **the** text editor for me, if only it had auto completion. Alas! So, the search began! I didn't want to use Vim, and so turned to next big name in text editing.... Emacs! An alias of complexity ._.

GNU Emacs

Emacs was a natural choice for me, as I care a lot about the Free Software movement and also because I like Richard Stallman. What would be better than using a piece of software that Mr. Stallman wrote himself! Emacs is a text editor, that does everything a computer can do.... (^_^)'
Learning Emacs was NOT easy... At all! The learning curve is quite steep. Its key bindings are hard to digest. But the flexibility it provides is amazing. You can really *do* stuff with it. Someone nicely said "Emacs is the way of life". So it seemed to me... for a while. Emacs is a great editor if you're using it in a terminal, but not so much if you're using a GUI... well at least not to me.
There is no auto completion out of the box. And to customized Emacs, you need to learn Emacs Lisp.. which is just a overhead to me. 

Sublime Text

I checked out Sublime Text, but it was not the thing for me. Next I gave Kate a shot. It was nice and simple. Maybe a bit more simple than I would have liked. Auto completion was there, but not the sophisticated kind.

Atom

I finally found Atom! And it has become *the* text editor for me. It's got everything my programmer heart desired... sophisticated auto completion, snippets, syntax highlighting, syntax checking, multiple panes, Git integration and flexibility. It works pretty good out of the box. But you can also customize it to great level. It has a built in package manage to add new features to it. And some packages are really useful. I'd say that the GitHub team behind Atom has really achieved its goal.

"Our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability: an editor that will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won't outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers."


Update: I have switched to Visual Studio Code. Read more about it here.

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