What you look like says a lot about you. I’m not trying to advocate for being shallow, but that’s just the way things are. An underrated corrolary of this is that looking the part will help you be the part. My uncle’s work was going to toss out a ThinkPad because it was seven-ish years old and its HDMI out was broken, so he gave it to me, so I could be a Real Coder (everyone knows Real Coders, guys who hack on Linux, use ThinkPads), and I’ve gotten much better at coding since. I have that down.

Text editors are also the case. You can tell even more about someone’s coding prowess by their text editor than their machine because machines are constrained by budget. All a new MBP says about a kid is that his (in the CS department, that’s the correct pronoun some 97% of the time) parents have money and like him enough to blow it on a beast of a laptop he won’t ever need half the power of. Pretty much every text editor ever is free.

From my teenage years, my family was pretty comfortable, but my parents are still immigrants who think that dropping two bands on a literal computer is ridiculous. I agree with them.

  • Below-average students seem to use IntelliJ. (Nothing against IntelliJ. It’s a great product. If I was doing Enterprise Java, I’d probably use it too). I don’t like debuggers, but Carmack likes debuggers, and he’s a better programmer than I am.
  • The average student uses VS Code. (On a new MBP.)
  • The rockstar student uses VS Code with the Vim motions on either Ubuntu or the aformentioned new MBP. There are plenty of absolute sharks in this category– guys with FAANG offers, guys who can reliably do LeetCode hards, guys who can coherently explain what Kubernetes does because they used it for a side project.
  • The most cracked of the cracked kids I’ve met– two absolute genius wizards, much better than me at theory (and I’m a weird case of a CS student who really likes theory and kinda sucks at coding) ran Arch and absolutely Primeagen level-riced Neovim setups. Neither used a preconfigured distro– I talked to both about their editors and they both (separately) said Linux and Neovim ricing is a literal hobby for them.

I use text editors a lot. Obviously, because I’m taking 18 credits, 15 of which are CS classes, I write a lot of code, but one of the things I like to do for fun is write English. (Like I’m doing right now). I do that in a text editor too, because Microsoft Word doesn’t have Vim keybinds– I just use Pandoc to render my .md files to PDFs.

For the longest time, until about a week ago, I was using Sublime Text with Vim emulations, and WSL2 Ubuntu. (I won’t actually switch to Linux because I need my DAW, for my guitar and vocals stuff, to work.) I picked Sublime because it’s unique– I’ve never seen anyone else use it, and secondarily because VS Code is slow as hell. (Electron apps were a mistake.)

Sublime is actually a fantastic product. Most importantly, I did get some “woah dude what editor is that?” Less importantly, it offers all of VS Code’s functionality that I actually used, and it isn’t a browser, so it’s fast; the only issue is that you ought to pay for it. You can use it without paying indefinitely, but it’ll show you a popup saying that it isn’t free, like WinRAR. That’s a popup every three hours that reminds me how broke I am. So I’d been looking at other text editors.

The most obvious is Neovim, mostly because I’m pretty fast at the Vim keybinds. Neovim is a great piece of software. I do like Neovim a lot; the only issue is that a lot of people use it. It’s also suprisingly slow, even with a minimal config (no big LunarVim/etc distro or anything)– just line numbers and a new color theme, no LSP support or fuzzy finder. There’s a GUI for it, called Neovide, which is pretty solid– I used it for a couple weeks, but I found a better option that’s both nicer to use and gives me a leg up in the “I have a more esoteric setup than you” arms race (that only exists in my own mind).

What I’m writing this on is Emacs. I’m using a minimal, largely theme-based distro, called NANO. (Not to be confused with the text editor.) Besides actually writing elisp, I’ve applied significant customizations to make it similar to VS Code in functionality. It’s much snappier than Neovim in the terminal window, the key chords appeal to my guitarist sensibilities, but unlike VS Code, it’s fast and the modal keybinds (like my beloved macros and :%s) feel good.

However, the biggest benefit is that no one uses Emacs, so I get to be a special snowflake. Take that!