25 Editors

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What’s your IDE is a friendly way to break the ice in any discussion with another hacker. It can quickly spiral into an editor war but all will be fine for the hackers who can appreciate the hidden beauty of things. We are often passionate about the editors we use and readily jump to the defence of their functionality. Nonetheless, the only editor you ever need is Emacs.

Emacs has been my editor of choice since 1984. Despite using almost every other editor that has emerged over the decades I always come back to Emacs. Emacs is a comprehensively extensible editor and interactive development environment and email client and web browser and document previewer and psychological assistant and address book manager and task manager and diary and calculator and kitchen sink and Swiss army knife. It literally can do anything!

Others speak equally passionately about vi. Today’s top pick is probably vscode, which is open source and widely used and plenty of sophisticated functionality.

In this current chapter we cover various editors and include basic introductions to get started.

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