I generally don’t post that much about the tools I use as they’re pretty standard fare and most of the time, your success as a programmer depends more on your skills than on your tools. Mastery of your tools will make you a better software engineer, but if you put the tools first, you end up with the cart before the horse.

I guess people have noticed that I use Emacs a lot :). My use of it is mainly for writing and editing code (and some newsgroup reading at home using Gnus) and I generally use it only for longer coding sessions. As a lot of my work is on Windows, one of the main tools I use is Visual Studio - almost exclusively 2010 right now, although I’ve taken a few peeks at 2012 and have used pretty much every version since VC++ 4. While I tend to use Emacs as soon as I’m editing more than two lines I tend to make the small changes that you get to make while debugging in Visual Studio.

I did actually try SublimeText 2 a little while back as people were raving about it in various podcasts and on blogs. I did like its speed and uncluttered appearance but quickly fell into the “old dog refusing to learn new tricks” routine. OK, this is a slight exaggeration but after a few days I didn’t get the feeling that using it over Emacs did anything to my enjoyment of programming or my productivity. I think part of the problem is that using any editor out of the box versus an editor that one has used over several years and customized to reflect new things learned about both one’s own tool use and ideas borrowed from co-workers is simply not a fair comparison, but it is similar to a musician trying out a new instrument after getting comfortable with his current instrument over a few years. If you do care about your craft an editor is a central piece of your workflow and once you can use it without having to think about how you accomplish a certain task, it gets harder to change.

Nevertheless, I would recommend that if you are a programmer in search for a better editor than the one your IDE offers and don’t want to invest the substantial amount of time to get comfortable and productive with the editing dinosaurs like Vi/Vim and Emacs, go check out SublimeTex t2. I promise it is worth your while.

Oddly enough my main takeaway from trying out SublimeText 2 was that I - who has been proponent of high-contrast colour schemes for editors like the one used by the old Norton Editor (yellow on blue) - really got into the low-contrast default theme. So much in fact that with Emacs 24’s theme support, I’m now using this version of zenburn for Emacs. The other takeaway was that I really appreciated the fast startup time and having a slightly better editor around than Notepad when it came to all the quick editing tasks one has to accomplish that would either mess up my carefully set up Emacs or require a second instance of Emacs for “scratch editing”. I ended up with Notepad++ for that and it seems to do the job admireably so far.

Another of the tools I discovered on Scott Hanselman’s blog is Console2. I much prefer it over the standard Windows command prompt so give it a whirl!

I also tried ConEmu as Scott recommended that in a separate post - I’m a little undecided as of yet which one I prefer. Both seem to work just fine and are a massive improvement over the original MS command window - if you’re a command line junkie like I am, having one or two tabbed command windows hanging around rather than a plethora of command windows is a massive boon. Try both, see which one you prefer - so far I do like the feel of ConEmu actually being developed (there are frequent new releases available) but Console2 simply seems to work, too. I think it’s just a matter of personal preference.

Speaking of command line tools, I recently had one of these “wow, these guys are still around” moments when I discovered that JPSoft is still offering a replacement command line processor for windows. I used to be a pretty heavy user of both 4Dos and 4NT back in the early nineties when they were distributed as shareware and you had to buy the documentation as a proper dead tree version to acquire a license. Actually I think I still have both manuals in a storage unit somewhere…

Anyway, I have been playing with the latest incarnation of their free command line tool (TCC/LE) and I really like it. Enough so that I’ll probably end up buying the full version. Basically if you are looking for a “DOS prompt on steriods” rather than using Bash via Cygwin or Powershell - which aren’t always that useful, especially if you need compatibility with existing batch files - I would strongly recommend you check it out.