I’m from the old mainframe’s IBM TSO/ISPF programming school.
My deepest sympathy 
These looked already antediluvian when I started my professional life… in 1982.
As for emacs and vim, I feel I’m not prepared to them, mainly because I don’t have free memory available.
I don’t know for Emacs, but if you have enough memory to process images, Vim should be under the RAM radar. On my system its code footprint is about the same as the script-fu interpreter componet in Gimp (~3MB…).
You’re exaggerating… that wasn’t so bad 
Oh! No, I was referring to my own organic memory. Like you’ve mentioned before, I’m on the team of people who hasn’t free memory cells available
At that time I was using VM/SP. So TSO looked very bad.
You don’t know how bad things are until you see the alternatives. I recently worked with folks who consider Cobol as a nice language. They have never coded in anything else, and are using 3270 terminal emulators with 24*80 screens. They are in their late 30s or 40s so not that old. Their management told me that to hire them, they roam universities to find students in “dead-end” sciences (geology, chemistry, …) and lure them in a Cobol class. They have to do that because the natural candidates (people with CompSci degrees) leave the interview as soon as Cobol is mentioned.
As far as I remember, I’ve never worked in pure TSO, but with that ISPF layer, so I had everything I needed easily at my hands to develop, produce a test environment, test and stage for production (actually, there was an intermediary test environment that I had no permission to get into, aimed at user testing. Only after that things went into production)
Wow! Now, that’s a story!! I’m not sure if I’m more baffled by the fact that people is still hiring dinosaurs, or that people who do basic science does not find a decent place to work… Basic science, here where I live, started to be under heavy attack, and imho this is not good, because you’ll always need to waste some resources on that, regardless you’ll have immediate, monetizable results or not. Cutting edge technology only exists because of basic science, isn’t it? And to have a sustainable basic science production, I can’t imagine other alternative than a state sponsored research. We can’t depend on individual geniuses to do it right on their garage.
Nevertheless, It’s almost tempting to get back to Cobol and CICS… I suspect they pay well for that,
Linux: gedit, 'specially since I installed the git and brackets plugins.
Windows: Notepad++
I never warmed to vi, emacs, or their kin. I can vi if I have to, but geesh…
When I install a linux anywhere, I firstly install or build joe. That 's my vi…
I used to be a Sublime Text user. Then I tried Atom which was open source and worked on similar principles. Then last year I was introduced during a hackathon to Microsoft’s VSCode, and I was surprised that nerds would point me to a Microsoft product… I used to be against all things M$, then I extended my a-priori dislike also to Apple products, but this VSCode for some reasons got me hooked.
Similar to Atom thus similar to Sublime Text too, supposedly faster than Atom (but haven’t made a strict comparison since I first moved to VSCode), it has all the functionalities that I need, it is constantly updated, open source, I like it and feel comfortable in it. I use it to write articles, notes, to do my scientific python programming at work, I would recommend it.
Hey @gadolf
Obligatory reference:
You want a tool which helps you see the right things, find the right functions, pass the right parameters, point out issues. A tool which clears the way, not stands in your way.
Nano is too basic for anything other than scribbling down pancake recipes and editing config files.
vim is for obsessive-compulsive masochists on the spectrum. Having said that, I’ve been using and loving it for years. With the right theme and setup it’s a joy to look at. Here’s a screenshot of a random ruby file in vim using the monokai_crusoexia theme:
I think you’re basically looking at Atom (open-source) vs Brackets (open-source) vs Sublime (proprietary) vs RubyMine (proprietary, expensive, maybe worth it).
Sublime Text 3 is admittedly still my favourite even though its not Open Source. Although if you want something easy to move to Visual Studio Code has a Sublime keymappings plugin. You would feel right at home with that.
I’ve tried Atom before but performance was terrible and I wouldn’t be able to recommend it over VSCode or Sublime.
I have been developing web applications with RoR several years (but not now).
I used to work with Vim/Neovim and plugins as vim-rails (easy navigation around project, rake tasks autocompletion, projections, …), ctrlp, vim-surround, vim-rspec (syntax, execute specific tests/spec or complete scenarios)… And others plugins from tpope.
It’s already said but it has a learning curve and a lot of time to customise to taste.
Now it depends on your attitude 
I use nano for simple stuff, emacs for heavy lifting.
Was it intentional by the OP to start off another battle in the Eternal Holy War?
Nothing sacred about this. Hope I don’t get banned. 
@gadolf Let us know what you settle on in the end. 
I’ve already mentioned it above, but I’ll give an update.
I’m working on a small project either at work and home.
At work, I’m on Windows, developing the web site hosted on a local linux vm.
At home, I vpn to this vm.
Atom is extremely slow when I connect to the remote samba share where the code is. (around 13 to 15 seconds to open any piece of code or refresh the file manager!
Geany is way faster (around 2 to 3s) and I started with it. It’s more than enough to me, but it lacks a bit of automation in identifying the code languages (erb, rails, ruby).
As a side note, at home I have an excelent cable connection of 60 Mbps, and at work we have a dedicated connectios of 20 Mbps, so I don’t think connection quality could be blamed for the lags.
After @DylanC hint about vscode, specially being it open source, I installed it at home and it lags more than Geany but less than Atom, so I guess I will end working with Geany.
I’m at work now and just came from installing vscode and it doesn’t seem to present the lags I felt at home, so I will start using it here.
No, neither have it seemed to happen so far. I’ve only seen a variety of polite opinions, and some jokes between people who seem to know each other for some time, so, at least to me, I’m more than satisfied.
I thank you all again for keeping updating the thread! I will add a [CLOSED] prefix to the thread, but, obviously, nothing prevents it to continue growing.
… just like the Emacs code base. By the way, Emacs is said to have become self-aware sometime around 2012, so be careful what you type about it on any system where it’s installed. 
Sometimes, I walk through [CLOSED] screen doors…
I ASSumed that I was likely the only person here with a TSO/ISPF background. Nice to know I’m not the only dinosaur. I’m still in the mainframe world today. Fortunately, as an internals guy, I’ve managed to avoid COBOL since my university days.
I’ve come to the conclusion that, with editors, there are horses for courses. I still happily use ISPF for Assembler, JCL, parmlib, etc., but wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole for C, C++, Java, etc. For those, I mostly use Atom for its slick integration with Git, but I also have a soft spot for jEdit and still use it for projects that are not in Git.
+1 to @gadolf on the lack of [human] memory to use emacs or vim. I have a good memory, but it’s short.
Well, this is a bit off topic, but since it mentions the editor I adopted, here it goes:
They also point to the role of independent contributors to many corporate-underwritten projects. “For example, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code project has over 19,000 contributors in total. It is the most popular GitHub project by a significant margin.”
I think they are more open about it now. 
PS By open, I mean speaking about it publicly. Companies have always interacted with open source, whether it be for altruistic or selfish reasons.
The survey seems flawed, as it only surveys githib, a platform Microsoft now owns and pushes their source code to.
Both gnome and KDE have open code repos that could’ve been crawled.
Plus GitLab, BitBucket, SourceForge, and so on…
It’s interesting to watch, though. IBM, for example, has been contributing to Linux itself (largely to make it interoperate better with IBM’s proprietary hardware and software) for quite a few years. They have worked together with Red Hat, SuSE, and more recently Canonical, to allow those companies to produce Linux systems that run on IBM mainframes. You have to wonder how SuSE and Canonical will fare on the mainframe going forward, given IBM’s purchase of Red Hat.
For any of the big companies, any appearance of altruism is most often a mirage. At a minimum, they expect their reputation to be burnished and their market share to rise.
Install Cygwin on Windows (RT) ™ 
and you will have nano, vi and so on. It is also best way for Windows users to learn how to use Linux shell
Geany you can install on Windows without Cygwin. Eclipse and NetBeans for profesionals 
No need for that, I’m on Linux already
Thanks anyway.
