I’ve been having so many issues with Visual Studio Code, I decided to bend over and play around with Notepad. Honestly, i’m really enjoying it. Tabbing is a bit screwy, but I just tap space a few times to keep everything aligned/formatted nicely. In fact, weighing all the positives and negatives… I find this tolerable if not better (obviously not objectively, but for me it is). No color aberrations from all the syntax highlighting and far less ram usage (I only have 8GBs). I also feel like it forces me to think/code with purpose because there is no IDE/auto-completion to help. That’s not a bad thing, but the thought in the back of my mind of “nothing is really there to help you, you are on your own” boosts my confidence level greatly. To the point where I thought it was going to be a placebo effect, but in reality, I noticed an actual difference in workflow performance (noticed it when I was adding a feature to my gameserver today). The more I feel like I am in control, the more my code becomes coherent. Thus, that makes me feel more coherent, and the cycle continues. Hard to explain, but hope that makes sense!
I used to be an avid Notepad++ user back when I was 13-14 years old. Never stopped using Notepad++ until 25 or so. The only reason is because when I switched to Crystal, I had to find an editor with format on save. But at this point since I feel so comfortable with Crystal, syntax highlighting is not a big deal for me. I read Crystal code in Notepad like how I would read a book, I can’t imagine reading a book with syntax highlighting!
With all this said, this is subjective and just my personal experience!
I thought editing code in Notepad was going to be a PITA and annoying af. It’s actually not that bad! :D
If you have made it this far, thanks for reading!