My editors history
January 20, 2025
Today i was talking with a friend who wants to enter the programming world and as the kind of person who can start talking without stop about something that i like, i found myself talking about the different editors and languages i used along the way and i thought that could be an interesting post to recap a little history.
Most of the pictures will be from the internet as i dont have any screenshot saved that i could found, maybe there are some lost around different backups and hdds, but thats too much work at 2am on a sunday just for this.
Beginnings
The first thing that i remember related to programming is using FrontPage 98 as a kid dont undertanding anything i was doing, but making pictures with sounds with autoplay. I also remember printing some kind of glossary about all the different html tags available.
Along with this was editing batch files with notepad and also printing a manual of all the different commands and programs available.
I also remember doing “interactive games” on Microsoft PowerPoint 2000
All of this in a windows 98 PC. We didnt have full access to the internet in the 90s, thats why you have to print everything or at least save them for offline access. I always liked reading in paper.
Beginnings 2.0
Time passed and now with a more developed brain, i started understanding what i was doing and started tinkering with what techbros would classify as real programming languages.
First with Macromedia Flash MX coding in ActionScript what will be my first real software. Obviously full of bugs. As if my current ones werent. It was a simple form asking for your birthdate and it would tell you how many days you have lived. I remember that i didnt know about the standard library and that kind of functions, so it was written from scratch full of maths and ifs to handle all kind of edge cases. Maybe thats why today im not afraid to dive into internals today. This is lost media, i couldnt found it anywhere, not even the old images from the post i made in a local forum.
Then came Adobe’s version of Flash with its CS3 suite. Here i started doing what was more tipical for flash, silly animations and games.
Then came a more “desktop era” with Visual Basic 6, developing apps for a another local forum that i was part. (You could still download them from old posts, but i wont link them here).
Editor era
Until now, everything was some kind of IDEs and nothing about pure editor. After the desktop era, came my web era for the same forum i was making apps. They liked what i did and offered me to be part of the “webmaster” team. Although it didnt exist as they were using SMF but nothing would stop me from breaking things.
First came Notepad++ with its lovely Zenburn theme.
Then came SublimeText 2 and SublimeText 3 and its amazing package manager and monokai theme.
Then i spent a few months in Adobe Brackets and i still remember and love its inline edition that you can see in the screenshot. You could edit or view the css class from within the same html file without leaving. Something that i dont see i current editors.
Github launched Atom (and abandoned it) and i made the switch. I remember also writing some extensions for it.
But it was too slow and with few extensions, so i made the move to Visual Studio Code.
Present
Today i just use mostly vanilla Jetbrains Goland for work stuff.
And Neovim for everything else.
Outro
What i found interesting after writing this, something that also came around while talking, is that most of this journey was made along a group of people in different forums and communities. Something that seems to be dissapearing from todays internet.The sole idea of doing because you can, or exploring just for the fun of it and then sharing doesnt seem to be the norm now adays. All social networks seem alike, you see two profiles and they seem to be the same person. Or even the same network. You cant make it yours anymore. Why would you do a dive deep or get lost in different things, playing around and getting some fun and joy if you cant convert it to some monetary reward?. Thats the message that todays internet seems to be given, not one of exploration, fun and community as it used to feel. We have to be wanderers again, leave all those silos and make the web our own.
Leave your comment on the github issue, sending me an email or DMing me on twitter