I’ve been trying other editors. After a very long time using GNU Emacs (first used in the early 90s, full time since 2004ish) — I’ve been trying some other editors. 

First up: Visual Studio Code. 

In a previously life I used Visual Studio at a job. Before that I used Visual Basic 6.0 (and 4.0 and 3.0 and for DOS) but I’ve not used a Microsoft editor in almost 20 years. I tried both the official binaries (proprietary for no good reason) and Codium (free software but hard to find extensions for it). 

Overall verdict is that it’s pretty good. 

I’ve been working with a bunch of YAML stuff lately and it feels easier than Emacs for that. Also I never got the hang of Git in Emacs so that’s a bit easier. I don’t really understand why there’s a proprietary binary version and a community edition but the community edition has none of the freely licensed plugins. 

Second up: mg (Micro GNU Emacs)

This is my replacement for Emacs on a remote machine. A lot of people use vim on a server, but I have no interest in vim or vi. mg is nice because it feels enough like GNU Emacs but is micro so I’m not installing a lot of extra stuff I don’t need. Handy for when I need to edit something remotely, which is still somewhat regularly. 

Finally: Nova. 

This one is only for the Mac, but the Mac is where I spend about half my time lately. 

I really like Nova. I tried it out and decided it was worth the registration fee. It feels very polished in a way that I’d hope other editors could be. 

Mac only, and proprietary but it certainly could be something I use more if I used a Mac more.