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Sorry for being a bit of topic but why is everybody so enthusiastic? I just installed the editor in Windows and it costs 70$! Is it that good? I remember installing it in Arch Linux for free without warnings... What is the deal? The website is not very clear on the exact license plus I found some alternatives that look the same on first glance (i.e. Lime Text).


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I like it because it is lightweight and runs similarly on windows and mac. And it’s free so a good compromise for people I work with who are deep in the IDE wars. I haven’t used it on Linux so can’t speak of that environment.

I don’t code all day, so it’s a good drop in editor that doesn’t require paying a license, but has more functionality than vim.


What's so exciting about this? As far as I can tell it's just a pretty basic editor. Is there anything innovative in it?

I remember trying this editor out when I was looking for something good on Windows before I switched to using Vim. It was well thought-out; very TextMate-like.

How does this not completely kill their business? Are they really expecting everyone to pay? Or is there only partial openness to the source?

edit: Just saw eli's comment that the core is in fact closed.


What's there to talk about? You install it and suddenly you have the same programming language features that everyone else does, but in an editor that can actually manipulate text.

It's a dead simple editor, comparing to VIM or Emacs (both I used a lot). Everything behaves just as you would expect.

And it's fast, it's small, and it's got a lot of packages. What more do you want?


Genuinely glad I bought a copy before it went open source. :)

It's a pretty awesome editor. A lot of the editing power of VIM but behaves like an actual OS X app. Also: built in scripting with a Lisp-like language.

Being open source immediately vaults it ahead of Textmate/Sublime Text for me.


Probably because it was the default editor in a bunch of Linux distributions.

It looks like a neat editor, but it's a shame it's (as of yet) closed source. Especially in today's world of dozens of useful products springing up every few months and going inactive shortly thereafter. I'm not usually a religious FOSSer, but I think every editor that has gone OSS has benefited immensely from the move.

It's a simple, lightweight text editor that doesn't require abstruse knowledge to use.

Im not particularly overawed with emacs or vim features. I've seen some people give breathless demos explaining how cool it was that they could do certain things and not felt especially impressed, especially given the learning curve. They seemed to be optimizing for things I don't need to optimize for.


It's been the "standard" editor at my place of employment, but no one objects to other editors or IDEs being used instead. Our workstations are all Windows, so it's a decent default to install for everyone.

I am confused. I expected an editor but the link goes to a promising looking OS? Can anyone recommend a good editor for this Emacs OS? Maybe someone has ported ViM?

It isn't as pretty as Sublime Text but I am a long time (~15 years I think now) user of UltraEdit. I have never used the Linux or OS X versions just Windows but it is a pretty solid editor with loads of features and very, very fast. Kind of pricy these days though, I bought it a long time ago with a lifetime upgrade license and it has been well worth the money IMHO.

It is my go-to editor, even for Linux dev stuff now that WSL is better integrated with Windows.

I bought EditPlus (www.editplus.com) way back when I was in high school (NT4 days), and the license is still good for newer versions. I've lost the license twice, don't have the CC or email address it was registered to, and Sangil has been very responsive about getting me my license info even without that stuff.

Since I bought it, they've added code folding, which is really nice. It's really just a plain jane text editor with pluggable syntax highlighting. The ability to save to a remote server is really nice, too, especially if you're doing remote dev work. I just wish it had SFTP support instead of just FTP. Or SCP. Whatever. Something more secure.

It's incredibly fast and lightweight, and I've never felt a need to use anything else.

I've also been known to use jEdit, nedit, and vim, depending on what type of environment I'm working in/through.


I've paid for it, and for a bunch of other editors such as TextMate, BBEdit and Chocolate as well. These days I pretty much only use VSCode, which is, ironically, given away for free (but it's so good that I would actually pay for it if MS charged for it).

There's a difference in productive typing and typing to set up your editor. I would compare this to the popularity in Ubuntu vs Arch, too.

It doesn't have to be a full IDE. Sublime Text and Textmate before it have both been very successful while charging a respectable fee.

Maybe the slightly-snarky lesson here is "developers will pay decent money for a text editor... on OSX".


It's free, it has all the features I want from a text editor (not very many), and it doesn't get in the way of my programming at all, so no reason to switch.

I bought it for a Modern Editor to replace Emacs. The editor is solid but there aren't many great plugins/community, like in Emacsland.
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