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Developer Tools: The Code Editor

Conlin Durbin on February 27, 2019

Welcome back, friends! Today, we are going to be looking at the code editor. This is a Software Engineer's bread and butter. It's how you take the...
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Ben Lovy • Edited

I like how you say the Vim/Emacs debate will rage until the end of time - and then leave my beloved Emacs off your link list!

Just teasin' of course - great write-up. Extending your editor is a fantastic litmus test.

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Fred Ross

I always have Emacs open and still use vim for lots of things when ssh'd into servers...and I advise young engineers to learn neither unless they absolutely have to. My sunk cost needn't be their hazing.

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Ben Lovy

For sure. Learning programming and Emacs at the same time is a bad plan - but it saddens me to think that many never even take a look once they've gotten over the initial hump.

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Conlin Durbin

Haha! If you have some good Emacs links I'll include them! To be fair, I didn't add Vim either :P

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Sundeep

I use Vim, so here's my curated list of Vim resources

I do have one bookmarked for emacs as well The Ultimate Collection of Emacs Resources

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Glenn Carremans

Currently my theme of choice that I use for almost everything (iTerm, Android Studio, PHPStorm, ...) is Dracula.
It is open-source and supports a lot of different tools.

Link: draculatheme.com/

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Kelvien Hidayat

Definitely agree with your point on improving our understanding of the inner workings of an IDE by building a plugin (or extension in VS Code term)

I can testify that building an extension for VS Code is made easy. They have good documentation, and man that type-hinting in VS Code because of Typescript is just helpful. Saves me big time and prevents me from falling too deep through a rabbit hole because of the nature of loosely type in Javascript. Although I've probably only scratched the surface of VS Code works.

Last weekend I made myself an extension called 'Hue'. An extension to control your Hue lights ad-hoc and through the file types that you are working on. Would love to get feedback :)

marketplace.visualstudio.com/items...

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Harvey Thompson • Edited

If you are a code developer look into LSP and DAP which provide language and debugger support for any editors that support these protocols. This came from how VSCode provides these services, but pretty much every editor/language combo is probably supported.

Essentially you will be able to do things like auto-completion, reference/definition finding, and debugging for pretty much any language in your editor using a standard interface. Amazing!

See:

I've yet to configure Emacs to use these personally, it's on my list to do very soon...

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Mihail Malo

The link to https://dankneon.com/ is broken, it shows up as a relative link on dev.to.

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Conlin Durbin

Good catch! Thanks!

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Sundeep
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Conlin Durbin

Added thanks!