QBasic, which didn't really make a distinction between its editor/IDE and the interpreter.
And a for my first steps in web development it was Windows notepad, which I quickly replaced with an editor called phase 5.

Great. Now I feel really old.

There have been so many over the years...
I am a quite firm believer in continuously trying different things to see if something works better for you then the previous thing.

This means that I might focus on other aspects of a tool then most - for instance, I do not really care about the plugin ecosystem all that much, as I think a great tool has to be great out of the box, not only after days, weeks or months of fine tuning.

Don't get me wrong, I do adapt tools over time, but I try to keep this to a minimum. Anyhow, I digress, and every rule has an exception (more on that in a minute).

I got into computers in the 90s and my first editor was Notepad. I first wrote some scripts and later I developed my schools website using it. Yup, it used <blink> and also <marquee>. Yup, on the same element. Apologies for anyone who ever saw that site.

I guess the line above answers the question, so feel free to stop reading here. If you are interested in the journey since, and on my thoughts on tools in general, please read on \o/

A few years later I went into DreamWeaver because a friend had a license and I thought it looked so professional. That did not last long ^^
Eclipse was next, and i actually wrote my first ever production code there. When I joined the first consulting company I worked in, I used Coda and later Brackets, JetBrains and Sublime. All of these were also relatively short journeys, because a colleague introduced me to Vim.

You probably guessed already that Vim is the exception to my 'rule' above. The Vim setup I use today is nothing like the out-of-the-box Vim experience (here is a shameless plug if you want to have a look at my configuration). Perhaps this is also because I have stuck with it for the longest time.
Either way, despite still using this tried and true tool from time to time, these days I have more or less switched entirely to VSCode (probably with less than 5 plugins) and I love it.

This all is just a really long winded way of saying:
Use what works for you, and always at least test drive things that look interesting. At the same time, I do not change just for the sake of change anymore, and any tool I use today has to at least meet these criteria...

1. Be local and available offline (I am not into browser based tools).
2. Have great search/file navigation and key based navigation.
3. Get out of my way.

I balance these and also my 'minimum customisation' rule in practise of course, since after all - a text editor is where i spend most of my time - so it has to be a place i enjoy and something that helps me be productive.

BASIC on the 48K ZX Spectrum (back in 1983)

i started my coding journey back in August 2018 in my uni. we used Gedit for a around 2 years, in 2020 November i shifted to vs code and it's very handy.

Sublime Text 2 I believe whatever that was popular around 2015-2016, then there was a short period of atom. I think I picked it up because of Travis Neilson of devtips, finally I settled with VSCode

Occasionally I would pick up rubymine for ruby development but even then I have gone back to using vscode for ruby.

Oh I forgot there was period of me trying to get in VIM, and I was using macvim + janus in order to look cool that didn't last very long, now I just use the vim extension for VSCode.

VSCode is the best, light text editor yet powerful as IDE

I started at college 10 years ago and remember like it was yesterday, I was so excited to start coding and there it was, I saw the first time the death blue screen on the console for..C!!!

That was my first language and we worked on the cmd, after 2 months teachers let us move to an editor, we used notepad but the big ones took Notepad++. Great days!

notepad :3

back then sites didn't need too much fancy stuff and everyone could easily make a site... nowadays? not so sure hahaha

after notepad, in no specific order, I used turbo pascal, dev c++, python's normal thingy, eclipse, netbeans, sublime, visual studio and vscode.

I currently use sublime, vscode and visual studio(my main workstation).

My first code editor was Notepad too 🙂

DevCPP. I had some quite old book on C++ and author used it so I thought it would be a good choice. Later I found out there is much more sane Visual C++ 2010 Express.

My first code editor after that was Sublime Text. I spent much time on it after finally moving to VS Code (I changed few editors in the meantime but didn't use them for long). Nowadays I mostly use WebStorm and VS Code.

When I started using computers, I started with notepad because it was installed on the computer and I did not know any better. After reading a great deal of the editors available, I started using Vim. 10+ years later I still use Vim.