Mike Zamansky posted a quick review of programming editors and IDEs. It’s actually intended to be about picking a Java Editor/IDE in support of Java programming courses for teachers but it’s more generally useful. Zamansky, of course, is an Emacs guy but thinks that Emacs is not a good tool for beginners.
I see that opinion a lot, often expressed as Emacs is too difficult to learn for beginners and it doesn’t make sense to try to learn it at the same time as a new programming language. I consider that attitude an example of the tyranny of low expectations and grumpily reply that most worthwhile things aren’t easy and if you’re not willing to put in some effort, find another occupation. Still, Zamansky knows better than I ever will how to effectively teach CS to his target audience so, of course, I defer to his judgment on the matter. That’s true even though I know he shares my opinion that Emacs is not really hard to learn or use.
Having decided to not start with Emacs, he considers what editor he should start with. He looks at
- Emacs
- Gedit
- Vim
- Sublime Text
- Atom
- Jedit
- Eclipse
- DrJava
- Geany
- BlueJ
- IntelliJ
- VSCode
- JGrasp
I must admit that I hadn’t even heard of some of those so it was interesting to see what he had to say about them. Again, his evaluation is mostly in the context of teaching Java to teachers wanting to certify in Computer Science but his remarks are more widely useful even if they won’t necessarily help you choose an editor for your day job.