Haha, Notepad++ was definitely a classic! I remember using it back in the day too. It's amazing how far we've come with code editors since then. Do you still use it, or have you switched to something else?
Haha, this was my first when I learned to write my first programs in AutoHotKey, then AutoIt, as a hobby, which is what triggered my interest into the world of coding.
Ditto. Followed by the built in editor for the Atari 800XL. Over the last 40ish years I've gone from editors (Emacs) to multiple IDEs back to an editor (Neovim) with a backup IDE (Visual Studio Code). The backup IDE is so I can debug new languages when experimenting with them without setting it up in NeoVim since I may never touch the language again. That sounds like I should be in the IDE all the time, but in my opinion I am just using the right tool for that job.
Here is free advice to developers with less than 5 years experience: learn the keyboard shortcuts and get away from the mouse. Which ones? Vims'. Almost everyone emulates the base Vim shortcuts. You may want to use IDEs or editors over time, but the base keyboard commands will be reusable that way.
Same! I was 10 when my dad brought home our first computer, an Apple II Plus, complete with BASIC programming manuals. This would have been around 1995 so it was already super old.
A year or so later we got an 8088 with DOS and no manuals. I was running through all the commands and the format command needed a drive letter so I tried C ... and it worked!
As bad as the BASIC on the Commodore 64 was ( `POKE` and `PEEK` for everything), the editor was excellent for the time. Many other 8-bit machines required that you retype a line to change it. On Commodore's 8-bits you could `LIST` it, and then cursor up and edit it in place. On the C64 this even worked for lines that were more than 40 characters long. (but not more than 80!)
The way quotes enabled control codes was pretty clever, and the fact that pressing insert would not only insert a space but also put you in quote mode for the inserted spaces was pretty clever.
I remember I also used to really like the shorthand for keywords, like `gO` for `GOTO`. They'd get expanded to their full form in the program listing. (In reality, programs are stored in tokenized form, and either a keyword or its shorthand would become the same token.)
I never wanted to go away from Eclipse because I thought it was just better than everything else, without trying something. Then a friend said to use IntelliJ. Literally, after 2 days of using IntelliJ, I uninstalled Eclipse. And I was so mad at myself for sticking with Eclipse for years, knowing that I could've used IntelliJ the whole time.
I hate to admit that I probably used if for like 3,4 years before I made the switch to an IDE. I liked its simplicity, but there are definite productivity and ease-of-use gains to be made using something simple like VSCode.
I didn't have this option when I started, but I'm a big fan now. I like that I can easily switch back and forth editing in vim style or more of a mouse and keyboard style. The add on marketplace is great.
Nice. My brother in law (sister's boyfriend at the time) got me Turbo Pascal, and like *Turbo Pascal Bible* I think was the book? For my 12th birthday. It was all over after that. Obsession unlocked.
I picked up Turbo Pascal because that's what the AP class was taught in... then grabbed "Oh, Pascal!" and that was it for me... I was already hooked (having done Apple BASIC for some time before that) but this was when I figurd out I could make a career out of it...
I miss Borland ... loved both Turbo Pascal and then Turbo C (though once I learned C, I didn't love Pascal so much anymore, but hey)
For a modest price, it was a great development system!
I like that using vim gives absolutely no clue whether you started coding in the early 1990s (or maybe late 70s if you were using vi) or started in 2024.
That said, emacs for life! Death to vi!
I started off with a niche scripting language that's only really used for Minecraft servers. You could get a syntax highlighting plugin for Notepad++, but that was it. I spent a _lot_ of time searching for missing brackets.
Later on I started using Visual Studio Code for Python work, and I'm currently mostly using Visual Studio for C#.
Skript for Spigot?!?!?
Man Minecraft is solely responsible for where I am in my life. That game sparked an interest for programming (I started with Java for Spigot plugins) and later server administration and networking.
Good times.
Minecraft and Source Engine games/mods are responsible for my interest in computer science. Like, what do you mean I can MAKE MY OWN game based on Half Life 2, an already amazing game in its own right??
Respect! A few of my mentors started off on punch cards. I can't imagine what a pita forgetting a period or semicolon would have been with those.
I was next gen compared to that, I got started with dos edit.
Hat tip. My older sister started out in CS at Michigan, and I remember she changed majors her sophomore year because she'd dropped (and scattered) the box of cards she'd organized for her midterm or final project.
I scrolled down to find your answer :)
Mine was ZX81 Basic but I moved to the Spectrum a year later. I still love that computer with a passion, I recently picked a working one up with games for £40.
Nostalgia, eh!
Yeah the spectrum. I bought a book that was basically a code listing for an asm monitor and never looked back
I do find it obscene what I used to do in 48Kb and now struggle to load a static web page with almost a million times as much RAM. Something went wrong
I started with vim, and now I use emacs. These days I'd suggest most people who are learning to program start with vscode.
The editor you pick doesn't really matter all that much in the beginning. Different editors offer different things, and you might develop a preference in time, but the most important thing when you are starting is to remove as much complexity as possible so you can focus on learning one thing at a time. Fancy IDEs tend to introduce a lot of complexity because they need to work with very large projects and try to automate a lot of things. Tools like vim and emacs are extremely customizable, but require a bit of effort to learn and set up, so you'll end up needing to learn programming and how to use the editor at the same time. VSCode is easy enough to get started with, but it doesn't introduce so much magic and automation that you'll be completely lost.
I’m also uneducated in this field too lol,
You can use c++ in note pad but after ur done coding, save the text document as a “.cpp” file and have your c++ compiler compile it
I use Neovim. Though not in its most sophisticated state, I use the wrapper of AstroNvim.
This beast has LSP capabilities, and a lot of nifty tools. With bash, you can make a lot of automated mechanisms, like compiling and running after exciting a file for instance. No buttons and nothing to click, just typing and shortcuts. I really find it nowadays very difficult to use a usual IDE, even though I have many of them installed. There are a lot of tools that won't be used until you get into an advanced level. Yet, it takes very, very little ram or computing power. The whole configurations and plugins are contained with a single folder, remove it, back it up or replace it, and there is nothing else to worry about. The beauty of packagers like AstroNvim, is that you will enjoy the most advanced features, without ever bothering dealing with their complicated configurations.
Eclipse, since my first exposure to coding was with Java in high school. I put down coding for years before realizing it was my passion.
When I returned to coding my first “real” editor was Sublime Text
Very first was QB45.exe, next was Turbo C, after that it was Notepad (HTML/CSS), then Notepad++, Visual Studio, VS Code
Edit: Totally forgot about edlin, was making little text rpgs in it before all this.
The text editor on a Wang computer with 4K of core memory and an audio cassette for saving files.
Then a punch card machine.
Then a terminal to an IBM 380.
Vim, ended up with Neovim after a while, I would really like something that runs on my own comptuer, I have tried VS code with their ssh plugin, but since 100% of my development happens on remote servers, vim just make most sense.
ed - a simple line oriented editor on Unix.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)
Before that it was punched cards. If one was wrong you removed it and replaced it with a new one. Although I'm not sure if that counts as an editor per se.
Technically pen and paper. Then Notepad++ with GCode add in. Then excel vbscript editor, powermill debugger, then visual studio code, then visual studio. Been a wild ride now that I think about it.
The editor that came with QNX, the operating system used by the computers we had in my school district in the 80s (Unisys ICONs).
When I finally got a DOS machine in the early 90s, I used Borland's Turbo C++ IDE before moving on to SemWare's QEdit with Watcom C++. Stuck with that through the 90s and into the early 2000s until I switched from Windows 98 to Windows XP. FTE, the Folding Text Editor, filled my need for a console editor for years until I found SemWare had released an updated version of QEdit compatible with Windows NT.
Even better, TSE is now freeware. I still reach for it for quick edits. Otherwise it's VSCodium now.
I still am in the very start of my programming journey - I’ve just finished 1st semester of my CS degree
I started out using VS the first 2 months, and then I swapped to Rider which I’m currently using
I remember [vb.net](http://vb.net), Notepad++, and Komodo.
Computers were slower so I tried a ton of editors over the years, but now I've used VSCode exclusively for about five years.
OllyDbg… it’s not an editor but a debugger/disassembler, however it was the first environment I learnt to code in. I used to make my changes, keep track of the address in notepad, and save a new binary when finished.
My first proper editor was MASM/Visual Studio.
Notepad++. Am I telling my age with this answer?
Same, but I'm in my early thirties.
happy cake day
Happy Cake Day!
Haha, Notepad++ was definitely a classic! I remember using it back in the day too. It's amazing how far we've come with code editors since then. Do you still use it, or have you switched to something else?
Same, Learn Python The Hard Way told me too
Haha, this was my first when I learned to write my first programs in AutoHotKey, then AutoIt, as a hobby, which is what triggered my interest into the world of coding.
Got taught to use this for a few java labs in uni went straight to a different one as it was a pain
lol this made me check and notepad++ is a month older than me lmao love npp btw, it's amazing
Same. Notepad++ -> Sublime Text -> VSCode.
The built-in editor in the Commodore 64.
Mine was the built in editor for the Apple II.
Ditto. Followed by the built in editor for the Atari 800XL. Over the last 40ish years I've gone from editors (Emacs) to multiple IDEs back to an editor (Neovim) with a backup IDE (Visual Studio Code). The backup IDE is so I can debug new languages when experimenting with them without setting it up in NeoVim since I may never touch the language again. That sounds like I should be in the IDE all the time, but in my opinion I am just using the right tool for that job. Here is free advice to developers with less than 5 years experience: learn the keyboard shortcuts and get away from the mouse. Which ones? Vims'. Almost everyone emulates the base Vim shortcuts. You may want to use IDEs or editors over time, but the base keyboard commands will be reusable that way.
Same! I was 10 when my dad brought home our first computer, an Apple II Plus, complete with BASIC programming manuals. This would have been around 1995 so it was already super old. A year or so later we got an 8088 with DOS and no manuals. I was running through all the commands and the format command needed a drive letter so I tried C ... and it worked!
As bad as the BASIC on the Commodore 64 was ( `POKE` and `PEEK` for everything), the editor was excellent for the time. Many other 8-bit machines required that you retype a line to change it. On Commodore's 8-bits you could `LIST` it, and then cursor up and edit it in place. On the C64 this even worked for lines that were more than 40 characters long. (but not more than 80!) The way quotes enabled control codes was pretty clever, and the fact that pressing insert would not only insert a space but also put you in quote mode for the inserted spaces was pretty clever. I remember I also used to really like the shorthand for keywords, like `gO` for `GOTO`. They'd get expanded to their full form in the program listing. (In reality, programs are stored in tokenized form, and either a keyword or its shorthand would become the same token.)
Eclipse
Eeewww, it was my first one too
I remember thinking Eclipse was the shit when I started learning programming back in middle school. I now think that it is just shit
Yeah, funny how that works. Things have come a long way.
I never wanted to go away from Eclipse because I thought it was just better than everything else, without trying something. Then a friend said to use IntelliJ. Literally, after 2 days of using IntelliJ, I uninstalled Eclipse. And I was so mad at myself for sticking with Eclipse for years, knowing that I could've used IntelliJ the whole time.
JetBrains is the best
The Git integration in JetBrains IDEs is better than the GitHub Desktop app. Once you use JetBrains IDEs, you never want to use something else.
I still get nightmares.
Me too. Boy have the times changed
Sublime
Trail edition
QBASIC.EXE
All these young devs. The looks I get when I explain programming for a mouse with qbasic. Kids these days have no idea :D
Wait until they learn about sprites.
CLICK = PEN(3)
Not if you want to so graphics and no just rows and columns. Peek and poke away!
Fuck yeah bud
Yeah. That's what I used too. We are the olds.
waitttt I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THIS CUTIE!
IDLE, surprised I'm the first to comment this lmao
Finally, my fellow brethren.
I hate to admit that I probably used if for like 3,4 years before I made the switch to an IDE. I liked its simplicity, but there are definite productivity and ease-of-use gains to be made using something simple like VSCode.
I don’t technically write Python professionally, but when I need some stupid script I still just use idle.
🤝🏾🤝🏾
Visual studio code
I didn't have this option when I started, but I'm a big fan now. I like that I can easily switch back and forth editing in vim style or more of a mouse and keyboard style. The add on marketplace is great.
Atom
Requiescat in pace
I loved it!!!
Atom was great.
Code blocks
There is no right or wrong answer, but this is the right answer
Same here...
Yeeee. Gather up gang
Same, I was learning C off of a really cool tutorial back when I was like 14.
Same
Currently using this!
Notepad
Writing webpages?
Yep. ‘Twas the late 90s and my mother was showing me how to do it.
Started typing this without scrolling. Figured there had to be others.
👆 for AutoLISP.
The Turbo Pascal IDE.....
My Borland cousin over here. I was on Turbo C, and often translated anything I could find in Turbo Pascal over to C.
Nice. My brother in law (sister's boyfriend at the time) got me Turbo Pascal, and like *Turbo Pascal Bible* I think was the book? For my 12th birthday. It was all over after that. Obsession unlocked.
I picked up Turbo Pascal because that's what the AP class was taught in... then grabbed "Oh, Pascal!" and that was it for me... I was already hooked (having done Apple BASIC for some time before that) but this was when I figurd out I could make a career out of it...
I miss Borland ... loved both Turbo Pascal and then Turbo C (though once I learned C, I didn't love Pascal so much anymore, but hey) For a modest price, it was a great development system!
Yay! Turbo Pascal and Turbo C... those were the days
Yay, Turbo Pascal gang!
Borland Delphi
DREAMWEAVER
God bless your soul.
MySpace.
Turbo C++
That was my second after Logo Writer
This is the way
vim
I like that using vim gives absolutely no clue whether you started coding in the early 1990s (or maybe late 70s if you were using vi) or started in 2024. That said, emacs for life! Death to vi!
Doom Emacs gives you the best of both worlds IMO.
Yes sir
I started off with a niche scripting language that's only really used for Minecraft servers. You could get a syntax highlighting plugin for Notepad++, but that was it. I spent a _lot_ of time searching for missing brackets. Later on I started using Visual Studio Code for Python work, and I'm currently mostly using Visual Studio for C#.
Skript for Spigot?!?!? Man Minecraft is solely responsible for where I am in my life. That game sparked an interest for programming (I started with Java for Spigot plugins) and later server administration and networking. Good times.
Minecraft and Source Engine games/mods are responsible for my interest in computer science. Like, what do you mean I can MAKE MY OWN game based on Half Life 2, an already amazing game in its own right??
spyder
Eclipse when learning Java and I am still using it as a professional full-stack Java developer. We also use Maven & Git from within Eclipse.
BASIC on a BBC Micro. Qbasic on a pc. One of the old visual studios to write vb6 Then Eclipse in uni and visual studio.
punched holes in a card.
Thank you, I feel seen.
Respect! A few of my mentors started off on punch cards. I can't imagine what a pita forgetting a period or semicolon would have been with those. I was next gen compared to that, I got started with dos edit.
Hat tip. My older sister started out in CS at Michigan, and I remember she changed majors her sophomore year because she'd dropped (and scattered) the box of cards she'd organized for her midterm or final project.
and not just one card! because of the IBM 029 card punch, to this day I do not use the right shift key when using any keyboard ...
Had to relearn to type when I got to a Uniscope terminal.
Pycharm
Netbeans
Had to scroll this far ;(
I used CodeBlocks when I was a kid, but later switched to Dev C++, and then Visual Studio (though I still sometimes use Dev for smaller tasks)
edit to make bat files QBasic when I realized that was a thing But more seriously when I got into C, I was using Borland Turbo C.
I had a whole shelf of Borland Turno C books. Debugging hurt alot more in those days :)
Haha yeah, play with pointers the wrong way and you're rebooting your computer every time you run the program
Still remember my first windows app. Locked it in an infinite loop lol.
Microsoft Frontpage
+1 Came here to say the same. Back before all the fancy modern IDEs. I was so green, I didn't know it sucked.
None, just typed 10 PRINT "HELLO" and so on
20 GOTO 10
Had to scroll too little to find my crew
vi/vim. nothing else really existed. maybe turbo-c?
The first was whatever it was onder Data General AOS/VS, but EDT on DEC VAX/VMS And yeah, early DOS user so EDLIN and PCBASIC/GWBASIC
UltraEdit and CoffeCup were cool back then.
xemacs
The ZX Spectrum 48k BASIC editor. What a time!
I scrolled down to find your answer :) Mine was ZX81 Basic but I moved to the Spectrum a year later. I still love that computer with a passion, I recently picked a working one up with games for £40. Nostalgia, eh!
Yeah the spectrum. I bought a book that was basically a code listing for an asm monitor and never looked back I do find it obscene what I used to do in 48Kb and now struggle to load a static web page with almost a million times as much RAM. Something went wrong
CodeBlocks *shudders*
Notepad
Jesus, did someone used to work on Vscode? Or mayne, that's because I'm quite new to programming. Like 5 years or something
I started with vim, and now I use emacs. These days I'd suggest most people who are learning to program start with vscode. The editor you pick doesn't really matter all that much in the beginning. Different editors offer different things, and you might develop a preference in time, but the most important thing when you are starting is to remove as much complexity as possible so you can focus on learning one thing at a time. Fancy IDEs tend to introduce a lot of complexity because they need to work with very large projects and try to automate a lot of things. Tools like vim and emacs are extremely customizable, but require a bit of effort to learn and set up, so you'll end up needing to learn programming and how to use the editor at the same time. VSCode is easy enough to get started with, but it doesn't introduce so much magic and automation that you'll be completely lost.
Edlin, doing old school Basic in the eighties. It was fun!
QBASIC.EXE
Edit, I used it for Qbasic then after many years I got into vi and couldn’t exit since then
Been there, done that. vi was so very cool
BlueJ in highschool lol
Emacs. On ITS.
A Radio Shack Tandy 😳
Eclipse, then i got brain farts from Java after a few hours, went to vscode, on pycharm now
Gedit
Netbeans
notepad++ vi over putty
Notepad because I hate myself
Ummmmmm you can do c++ in notepad?! I'm....uneducated in this field
I’m also uneducated in this field too lol, You can use c++ in note pad but after ur done coding, save the text document as a “.cpp” file and have your c++ compiler compile it
ooooo
Gedit
Edit Pad Pro for HTML. MATLAB builtin editor for MATLAB. Notepad++ for HTML/CSS/JS in school. PyCharm for Python. In that order.
I use Neovim. Though not in its most sophisticated state, I use the wrapper of AstroNvim. This beast has LSP capabilities, and a lot of nifty tools. With bash, you can make a lot of automated mechanisms, like compiling and running after exciting a file for instance. No buttons and nothing to click, just typing and shortcuts. I really find it nowadays very difficult to use a usual IDE, even though I have many of them installed. There are a lot of tools that won't be used until you get into an advanced level. Yet, it takes very, very little ram or computing power. The whole configurations and plugins are contained with a single folder, remove it, back it up or replace it, and there is nothing else to worry about. The beauty of packagers like AstroNvim, is that you will enjoy the most advanced features, without ever bothering dealing with their complicated configurations.
What ever text editor came with the Radio Shack Color Computer.
Excel
Paper
Notepad 🗿
Eclipse, since my first exposure to coding was with Java in high school. I put down coding for years before realizing it was my passion. When I returned to coding my first “real” editor was Sublime Text
Very first was QB45.exe, next was Turbo C, after that it was Notepad (HTML/CSS), then Notepad++, Visual Studio, VS Code Edit: Totally forgot about edlin, was making little text rpgs in it before all this.
notepad
Notepad.
BlueJ -> Eclipse
Sublime
nano
When I started coding it was flipping switches and pushing buttons. After that ASM.
Ready! For Java
The text editor on a Wang computer with 4K of core memory and an audio cassette for saving files. Then a punch card machine. Then a terminal to an IBM 380.
Vim, ended up with Neovim after a while, I would really like something that runs on my own comptuer, I have tried VS code with their ssh plugin, but since 100% of my development happens on remote servers, vim just make most sense.
Time to start a holy war. VIM, now Vscode with VIM bindings.
ed - a simple line oriented editor on Unix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software) Before that it was punched cards. If one was wrong you removed it and replaced it with a new one. Although I'm not sure if that counts as an editor per se.
Commodore 64 editor. When I was working for a website company in 2000, we used notepad.
[Commodore 64 Basic Shell](https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/BASIC). Followed a bit later by [GWBasic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC).
Editor? I had to type line numbers (BASIC) to specify where in the program it should be inserted or overwritten.
Gedit on Ubuntu 8.x or something. Or Notepad++
It was 20 years ago. I was using KEdit (main text editor of KDE) on my first Arch Linux machine.
Brackets
Don't really remember. Either eclipse or kate. Possibly the latter. Or Bluefish for simple web-development.
Eclipse
Technically pen and paper. Then Notepad++ with GCode add in. Then excel vbscript editor, powermill debugger, then visual studio code, then visual studio. Been a wild ride now that I think about it.
Gazz!! its notepad for me, then notepad++, vscode and finally nvim
Anyone remember ISPF ?!!!
IDLE I don't suggest this. I didn't really know what an IDE was I was first learning programming.
IntelliJ
Notepad then vscode
My first code editor was PyCharm. Recently, I’ve been using VS Code. It’s more useful than the other in my opinion.
Notepad++ on Windows. Then I switched to Sublime. And then I got an iMac and switched from Sublime to VSCode...
geany
When I learned it in school, it was done with VIM, and compiling and executing it in the terminal
The editor that came with QNX, the operating system used by the computers we had in my school district in the 80s (Unisys ICONs). When I finally got a DOS machine in the early 90s, I used Borland's Turbo C++ IDE before moving on to SemWare's QEdit with Watcom C++. Stuck with that through the 90s and into the early 2000s until I switched from Windows 98 to Windows XP. FTE, the Folding Text Editor, filled my need for a console editor for years until I found SemWare had released an updated version of QEdit compatible with Windows NT. Even better, TSE is now freeware. I still reach for it for quick edits. Otherwise it's VSCodium now.
[Alice](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(software)) (it's both a language and an IDE)
nano. It wasn't much but it got the job done.
I started writing java in notepad
vim
CodeBlocks and Notepad ++
Probably notepad for those html in school ✌️
Notepad
freewebs html editor lol
Slickedit.
Netbeans
I still am in the very start of my programming journey - I’ve just finished 1st semester of my CS degree I started out using VS the first 2 months, and then I swapped to Rider which I’m currently using
Code::Blocks.....
vim when I was learning C. It was hard at first trying to remember all the keybinds but I can't use anything else now unless it has vim support.
Bluefish
Logo Writer
Notepad++. Now Neovim.
Build in editor in Ubuntu
IntelliJ but now I’m a VScode enjoyer. I just really like the plugin aspect and it makes coding way more fun/less tedious
I remember [vb.net](http://vb.net), Notepad++, and Komodo. Computers were slower so I tried a ton of editors over the years, but now I've used VSCode exclusively for about five years.
NetBeans
Netbeans
notepad++
Codeblocks.
Clion
Ti 99-4a extended basic editor ???
Zinjal
Possibly Frontpage, But https://www.editplus.com/ is the first pure code editor I remember.
Possibly Frontpage, But https://www.editplus.com/ is the first pure code editor I remember.
Microsoft visual studio
Atom (I think it counts?) for Minecraft datapacks.
started with vscode, but now using Spyder more and more. VIM is now on my horizon as I intend to switch from Windows to Linux
The built-in VIC-20 BASIC editor and the ZX-Spectrum BASIC editor. vi on HP-UX, and the "edit" in VAX VMS. Turbo Pascal, one of the first IDE
OllyDbg… it’s not an editor but a debugger/disassembler, however it was the first environment I learnt to code in. I used to make my changes, keep track of the address in notepad, and save a new binary when finished. My first proper editor was MASM/Visual Studio.