Three decades, twelve editors. From vi in 1995 to Helix in 2026. The languages, jobs, and habits each one carried. A nostalgic look back, written before editors became viewers.

vi. (1995)

That’s how it started. We had Wipro Unix server with dumb terminals. Writing mostly C programs for hobby. C, Fortran

Turbo C Editor. (1998)

Not a real favorite. It had keyboard shortcuts and mouse support though. It took me through final year project to design concrete structures based on structural analysis outputs, constraints and assumptions. C

Tedit. (1999)

Terminal editor of Tandem computers. T6530 emulation. We had more function keys than our open systems colleagues. And with OutsideView we were cooler than our mainframe colleagues! Screen COBOL, TAL, TACL

CodeWright. (2001)

This was probably the best editor I have used. Syntax highlighting, customisation, macros. It was quite ahead of its time. I was quite sad to see it wane away into oblivion. TAL, TACL, C89

Notepad++. (2004)

New place. No access to CodeWright. Started with Notepad++. I could define the syntax highlighting for TAL and TACL using user-defined languages. Plus it did not need installation, and that was quite convenient. It was with me for a good 9 years. C++, TACL, SQL, Perl, PHP

gedit. (2006)

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop. Breezy Badger. There was vim, but I was more drawn to gedit. Not much of programming. More of getting around in the Linux world. Python, Shell Scripts

TextMate. (2011)

Got my first MacBook Pro. And TextMate. It was underused for a couple of years, until I got into Ruby on Rails. And then TextMate was the thing. Trying to copy Ryan Bates from Railscasts. Another editor I missed. Ruby, CoffeeScript, HTML/CSS

Sublime Text. (2012)

I got it in 2012, but it was my second editor for a long time. And somewhere along the way, Sublime Text overtook. I think it was the Cmd+P shortcut in version 2 that made the difference. And the regex support. I still use Sublime Text (and Sublime Merge). The longest running editor in my toolbox. Python, Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Dart, Perl, PL/SQL, Lua, Shell Scripts

vim. (2014)

I made my first return to commandline. Vim and bash were mandated to everyone in my startup. Vim gyms and extensions. The startup didn’t last long. But vim stayed in the background. Extensions vanished, but with servers in the cloud vim remains handy. Ruby, Python

VS Code. (2018)

I had tried different Electron-based editors from the time of Atom. I never liked any of those, including VS Code. But then I started working with Java and Spring Boot. And VS Code’s support for Java was quite good, mostly for microservices. I did not want Eclipse or IntelliJ. VS Code became the dominant editor with the ecosystem of language servers and extensions. Until it started getting bloated. And then I removed it. Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, C#, HTML/CSS

Zed. (2025)

I am writing this in Zed. After I removed VS Code, Zed took its place. All the AI features are disabled. It’s a good editor. It has not replaced Sublime Text completely though. Go, TypeScript, Python

Helix. (2026)

New kid on the block. My latest attempt to return to commandline. If it was not for the vi/vim muscle memory, it would be the primary editor. It’s the default editor in the command line.

Postscript: Of late AI-assisted engineering has greatly affected how I use editors. I wrote this list to remember the journey. The years when I typed every character. Before the editors become viewers.