I’m learning Elixir and using VSCode for now.
Eclipse is my usual go-to tool, but it’s not quite there for Elixir.
Justin
ijcd
Emacs for coding since 1993. I use vim on servers. Sublime to explore new projects (easy to click and scan code), IntelliJ for anything Java-ish (refactorings and language integration). I’ve used everything else long enough to customize them and understand the pros and cons. Emacs config can be a chore to keep working. Vim plugins crash and hang at weird times. Atom plugins are of varying quality. Sublime/TextMate/intellij are a bear to get lots of editing done in.
I’m using Atom right now because my Emacs is sick, but I swear it’s taking me 3x longer to do large edits and refactorings It’s just harder to get the thoughts into the files. I don’t think it’s muscle memory either. Both emacs and vi(m) were created when you might wait a few seconds between typing and seeing what happened on the terminal, and are those optimized to deal with that efficiently.
My ideal? I want an Emacs/Vim that works better and has a lively ecosystem like Atom and easy code browsing like Sublime (Atom doesn’t do it as well, somehow), but where the plugins don’t break constantly. 
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Eiji
jdumont
Whatever editor you choose, learn it well.
And I mean it. Learn it really well, to the extent that you don’t have to think about how to accomplish a task, you can just do it.
0
Eiji
And this is a biggest problem with current editors. Instead of first-time setup when you configure everything in simple, but configurable GUI you need to learn shortcuts and edit configuration files manually, sometimes even lerning basics of other languages you will never use outside editor configuration.
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jdumont
I’d suggest the opposite is true though.
Surely it’s better to fully understand your editor, rather than get to grips with it quickly, only to come unstuck later because what was going on was abstracted away? In the grand scheme of things, the first half an hour you spend with a text editor is a very small fraction of your total usage over it’s/your lifetime.
I agree, having to learn another language in order to configure your editor should be unnecessary; but I don’t know of such an editor that requires that from the get-go?
If you (using “you” generally here…) need to immediately reach for config/plugins then perhaps either the editor isn’t up to the task, or you’ve missed some of the functionality the editor provides out of the box?
Learning an editor well should take some time, and you should probably invest the same time and energy that you do for a new language. Anything worth learning probably won’t come easily at first, and an editor can stay with you throughout your career, whereas a language is unlikely to do so.
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Almog
If I don’t want to use Emacs or VIM and yes I think they suck, what IDE would you recommend for Elixir and Phoenix. Been using Webstorm but not 100% working, I also use Atom for frontend work but I want something more like Webstorm. At lot of the devs that I know are raving about the new direction Visual Studio is going is anyone using it for Elixir?
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dimitarvp
IntelliJ IDEA if you are willing to pay their price. For me personally it’s very affordable but I still refused to pay due to their scheme. To pay a subscription to even use an IDE is a bit much for my taste.
I use Emacs for 16 years but thinking back, I never really mastered it. I mean, I know a lot of keyboard shortcuts but never really tinkered deeply with it. I wrote some custom functions and bound them to keys but nothing truly special. And navigating file trees is still clunky (at least when using the neotree plugin). I can try a few more that @amnu3387 mentioned though.
Problem is, as several other people mentioned, I don’t want the editor in my way. Give me sensible defaults and a way to do 100% of my work with the keyboard!
It’s not that I am lazy but I seriously can’t get very excited by tinkering with my work tools as before. Since I am gonna be buying an iMac Pro eventually and 100% of my environment will be Apple, I might as well learn Sublime Text 3… We should not have to tinker just to get things into an acceptable working shape.
I am working on learning VIM and will make a decision whether to keep Emacs or switch to VIM; the latter appeals to me due to its slightly more intuitive keyboard controls – they are basically abbreviations of the human actions (like d for deletion, similar to how sed operates, which I know quite well and love). But we’ll see.
IMO there are no hard rules. If you find yourself constantly sifting through hundreds of files then you probably should invest in editors that streamline that experience (IDEA, Sublime Text). If you find yourself working more deeply and introspectively on a smaller number of files, then Emacs and VIM should be perfect.
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Almog
Thanks, I have been using Visual Studio Code and I’m really happy with it, in my opinion it’s pretty amazing.
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