IDEs and text editors started getting mentioned in this thread. And it got me thinking, what editors do people like using for their code?
This isn’t really a poll because I can’t list every single text editor, but it would be nice to know what people use.
Disclaimer:
This isn’t a “what’s the best text editor contest”.
No holy wars or belittling other text editors.
I’ll start:
Sometimes I use the Arduino IDE for one-page throwaway sketches.
Usually I’ll use Notepad++ for small/medium stuff because it’s quick and easy to use.
But for really big projects like fully fledged games I use Visual Studio because of all the extra features, even if it flags up errors because I haven’t set it up to read the Arduino headers.
I am old school and use vim. It satisfies all my needs.
I use Atom with PlatformIO on OS X.
Atom is a great Editor with a ton of features like code completion and with PlatformIO i can directly compile and upload to the Arduboy.
I use the Arduino IDE for quick edits. For more extensive new code or changes I use GNOME gedit. (I use Ubuntu LInux as an O/S.) I use the Arduino IDE for compiling and uploading.
NOTE: For anyone who uses an editor other than the IDE’s built in one:
In the IDE you can select:
File > Preferences
and check:
Use external editor
Your sketch code will then be greyed out (read only) in the IDE and changes made and saved with any external editor will instantly be brought into the IDE when its window is selected. This makes it easy to verify/upload your changes using the IDE.
Also, if you associate .ino, .h, .cpp and .c files with the editor that you use, then with a sketch opened in the IDE you can use:
Sketch > Show Sketch Folder
and from there you can easily open your sketch file(s) in your editor.
Mostly emacs, but I’ll sometimes use vi (the original, not the rewrites that suffer from emacs envy) or ed (wrote my own in python to use on micropython boards).
Building/burning is also an important part of the process. The newer versions of Arduino can be used from the command line and work OK, but I got started with the Arduino make project long ago, and haven’t seen a lot of reason to change. Maybe if the include files break.
I use the Arduino IDE too, for a long time I tried to tune the IDE to my needs until the official version catch up with everything I expected from a basic IDE and I think now it is actually quite compelling but sometimes I need something extra, I would love autocomplete, refactoring stuff, etc much like MS VS.
Sublime totally. Great editor.
It’s a shame you didn’t try to get those changes accepted to the official version (or if you did, that they rejected you), some of those features look really handy.
Seconding sublime, just wish I could work out how to get the Arduino plugin working 
I use Atom since it works so well with GitHub. Seems to format pretty good for Arduino code.
I’ve been using vscode lately. I like the consistent interface across mac, windows and linux. I have it set up right now to use bash on windows for the integrated terminal. I have it sync the .vscode settings folder with git, so I’ll always have the right configuration. One thing I really like is that the UI can be customized to be very minimal!
VSCode is different from the other visual studio versions -
it’s a lightweight interface that relies on plugins for functionality.
VSCode has an addon for Arduino stuff that can be found here.
It requires the Arduino IDE and (obviously) VSCode itself.
From what I can tell, it basically does most of the stuff the IDE does, but with extra functionality and the basic VS stuff (like syntax highlighting and IntelliSense).
Worth a look. I might give it a go myself some time.
Neat, I actually haven’t used any Arduino-specific things in vscode yet; I didn’t see any when I first started using it anyway! I just installed the Arduino plugin, and it looks like it handles doing the command-line Arduino calls for you. I’m going to play around with it a bit more, but thanks for bringing it up!
Edit: Well, it adds some neat stuff to the status bar, and it is able to verify faster than when I used the arduboy command line in a shell script.
That’s the page I was looking at … see the throw-away line ‘Integrated Arduino Debugging New’.
Not sure if it will work with the current Arduboy; but it looks like it uses OpenOCD. https://github.com/ntfreak/openocd
I know that simavr works with gdb, and you can use gdb with vscode!
I have had a play with VSCode and I quite like it. My only issue is that when you compile and there is an issue, it does not position the cursor on the line in error. Is there any way to do that?
I’m sure they will add it in an update. When programming in TypeScript (the main reason I started using vscode), you get to see a lot of cool things happen when errors occur! https://code.visualstudio.com/images/1_11_exception-peekui.png
