Text editors

A text editor is a piece of software you will spend most of your time with while automating networks. Here I would like to make an overview of the most popular modern text editors.

VS Code

Good or bad, but today's text editor market is clearly dominated by Visual Studio Code. It has a great and ever-expanding collection of plugins, nice UI, built-in Git support, intelligent code completion, you name it.

VS Code is a free and open-source text editor built on Electron and owned by Microsoft. It was initially released in 2015.

Atom

Atom is another highly customizable open-source text editor created by GitHub. Since GitHub was acquired by Microsoft, Atom now is also a Microsoft product.

Atom also is free, open-source, and built on Electron. It was initially released in 2014.

PyCharm

PyCharm is a full-blown Python IDE by JetBrains. I've heard a lot of praise towards it in the context of Python development, but never tried it myself. PyCharm is shipped in two versions: full-featured Professional ($89/year subscription license) and less functional but free Community Edition.

PyCharm was initially released in 2010.

Sublime Text

Sublime is the oldest text editor on the list. It has some great features to itself like multiline editing and "Go To Anything" command which allows to quickly jump to the specific part of the text in any open tab. It also can be extended with plugins, but the package manager is not included by default and you'll have to install it manually first.

Sublime Text is a proprietary paid software written in C++ and initially released in 2008. It has a 30 day trial period. After that, you will be kindly reminded from time to time to buy an $80 license.

Summary

Learning to use a new text editor with all its shortcuts and plugins is a long-term time investment. If you haven't used any of these text editors I recommend picking VS Code as the most future-proof and well-rounded solution.