I’ve been on the JetBrains bandwagon for a long time and no desire to switch.

Right now, the jetbrains IDEs are my favourite because they are proper IDEs, not some editor with a bunch of scripts in a trenchcoat pretending to be an editor. But the company is starting to lose touch with its customers: developers who want an IDE for productivity, not a VS Code lookalike. It's like the company is finally being taken over by managers who don't know lick about development and it's starting to show (at least to me).

Now, I'm on the market for a new editor and even willing to pay, even though I'd prefer paying for an open source IDE. Right now, Zed is looking interesting. The only thing that bothers me is how loud people were about it. Hype destroys my faith in stuff as it's often just good marketing. Another thing that bugged me is that when they started, they were "Mac first, Linux maybe". But now that the hype has died down, there's much less "omg, zed is the new editor and it will be better anything else" type posts, and it supposedly works on Linux, I can give it a try.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Emacs!

With LSPs it works for just about anything and Magit is simply too good.

Neovim

I tried using VSCode because of the copilot integration, but frankly copilot is underwhelming for me. I gave “vibe coding” a shot on a personal project and the results were slower than just doing it myself.

I’m back to neovim. I’m very productive in customizing it and can never go back.

Unix is my IDE, vim is my editor.

Lazy Vim is super underrated imo

vim

Used to use vscode, then one day it stopped working for me. I've been using Helix full time for a few months now and I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm paying for the All Products Pack by Jetbrains, use them pretty much exclusively.

@rklm Rider or any #JetBrains IDE honestly. They're just too good compared to the alternatives I've tried and cheaper too.

The Unix shell remains an excellent IDE.

A huge array of text- and data-manipulation tools, with more available through the standard package manager in my operating system.

Add in a powerful text editor like Vim or Emacs, and nothing can beat this IDE.

Zed is definitely my go-to these days. Used to have vscode but the sluggishness just became too much for me. Zed does what vscode did right but faster.

Just wanted to throw Kate into the mix of suggestions…

NeoVim. Once I looked at vim as an IDE, I won't look back

Zed is delightful to work with, highly recommend it. It is very customizable, and debugger support is coming soon. It's like neovim but I don't have to spend 15% of my time maintaining it...

I use helix editor in the terminal (Technically not an IDE but neither is VSCode). Works great for a keyboard and terminal-centric workflow. I had to configure it a bit to get it where I want but after that I had a blast to write Rust projects in.

It does get a lot of getting used to if you're not used to vim-like keybinds, and does take memorizing shortcuts

My three IDE’s of choice in order of preference:

1. EMacs: ultimative workhorse which can do many more - especially with org-mode (however, time intensive to configure which is why I used also ChatGPT to get it done)

2. VSCodium: easy to manage almost anything due to its huge number of extensions

3. Vim: don’t know, sometimes I feel the need to work with Vim and it’s many shortcuts

All are free and open source.

Vim for most things. Vscode for js things. Jetbrains for specific stacks like all Python or such. VS for .net.

IDEs sure come and go, buy I seem to always go back to vim after a while.

VSCodium, with vim mode enabled. Came from neovim which still is the fastest experience ever but I had plugins break too frequently after an update. Besides vscode has some nice features (visual git tree for example) that neovim lacks.

I've tried lots of options, and I still go back to vscode.

I've extensively used neovim and it has been my main IDE for years, but I got tired of having to spend entire afternoons configuring it. And I had too many total breaks, that had led me to recently abandon it as an IDE, still use it sometimes but much less. It relies on too many plugins, which makes breaks more common imho.

I tried helix. But features are far from what I expect for an IDE, even a modal command line one.

On the gui territory, I tried Lapce, but it's still buggy and lacks features. Development pace is slow enough so I don't consider it could become my ide in the near future, I have hopes for it, but not much as it could easily become abandoned before it's usable.

I wanted to try Zed, but they seems to have a preference for macOS, which may have sense in the US but here I don't remember the last developer I saw using a mac. There's now a linux version, which I may try at some point, but some people commented that while in a better state than Lapce it's not still a production ready option for an text-editor-IDE. Also the company behind it doesn't inspire trust to me. There's something about it that smells fishy, I cannot quite put my finger on what, but there's something.

There are more options, some obscure, some old, some paid. For instance I usually hear good things about jetbrains ide. I tried intellij community and I'm not impressed, it's slightly better than eclipse, but it's not on the level of visual studio for dotnet. I'm not a student and I don't get paid for my hobby developments so paid options are a no-go.

So it is visual studio code for me. Sometimes I still use neovim, as I really like modal editors, and vim/neovim is my go to text editor anyways. I'm due to try emacs, and I'm hopeful for the future of both helix and Lapce, though I manage my emotions as I've know too many projects that just never deliver, so I'm cautious.

QtCreator is very nice as a C++ IDE. No, it doesn't force Qt on you in any way.

Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA for Java programming, emacs for everything else.

Currently I use Code OSS, which is less my favorite but it works.

Out of all the IDE's I've tried (vscode, webstorm, Code OSS, Kate, KDevelop), regular old Visual Studio 2022 is still my all time favorite, using it is such a smooth experience.

Its biggest flaw and why i had to switch is no linux support :(

I am currently learning Java so my favorite IDE is Intellij IDEA :)

I like vscodium. Basically the same as vscode but without MS stuff. (but that also means a few extensions are gone, like the c/c++ extension and intellicode)

Spacemacs

I use Code OSS with clangd and the nvim extension (because Microsoft disabled their c/c++ tools) because i want access to the nrfconnect extension pack as a beginner. I don't have to go searching in the documentation and compiling, then recompiling 10 times to self-discover the required devicetree parameters and figure out what drivers are available vs mainline zephyr.

Plus the debug interface works well.

For everything else possible it is vim/neovim, but I haven't been able to find good neovim setup for nrfconnect.

Gnome Builder.

I've been using neovim for years (and the vim family for decades), and I guess with LSP it's pretty much an IDE these days.

Jetbrains IDE's are top tier (but resource hungry). A text editor with some plugins is fine for smaller projects, like zed, sublime text or neovim

I don't know what the best IDE is, but I know what the best text editor is.

https://github.com/tsoding/ded

Tmux, neovim + NvChad

Emacs. Everything else feels lobotomised

Pycharm is great for Python. The style enforcement is fantastic.

Neither of these are IDEs (nor is VSCode), but it'd be Zed and Neovim for me. Zed is fast and pleasant to use, but also will enshittify eventually. Debug support is in progress but not live. Neovim is fun and it's nice to be more in control of what is going on, but I haven't made the necessary progress to be productive in large projects with it yet. I was excited for Lapce but it fell short, had too many issues in a short time.

Vscode when I'm feeling productive, neovim when I'm feeling saucy

Hate pretty much every other ide out there, but do occasionally get forced into Android studio or xcode. Xcode is the worst, msvs a close second.

One day a multi cursor first multi-language extension lightweight ide will replace vscode I'm sure but it's solid for now.