Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform, extension-driven code editor with IntelliSense-style completion plus integrated Git and debugging workflows. Users praise its versatility and ease of use for many programming workflows, though some complain it can feel resource-intensive and may get slower over time, especially after updates.
VSCodium tops the rankings as a fully open-source build of Code - OSS that removes telemetry while keeping most VS Code functionality and extensibility. Privacy-focused developers who want a VS Code-like experience often choose VSCodium specifically to avoid telemetry, though some Microsoft extensions may be unavailable. Sublime Text ranks second and is repeatedly praised for outstanding speed and being less resource-intensive than VS Code, making it popular with developers on slower machines or large projects.
The alternatives landscape spans lightweight text editors like Vim and Notepad++ to newer AI-first editors like Zed Editor, with over 100 alternatives covering code editors, full IDEs, and terminal-based editors.
Visual Studio Code is a code editor, but the alternatives span different approaches to development workflows. Open source options like VSCodium, Vim, and GNU Emacs appeal to users who want transparent licensing and community-driven tooling. For privacy-focused development, VSCodium and Helix emphasize no-tracking and telemetry prevention features.
Linux users have native options in VSCodium, Kate, and Lapce. Web-based development suits users who want browser-based environments - Replit and Firebase Studio run online for coding without local setup. For developers who live in the terminal, Micro, Neovim, and Helix target command-line workflows useful for SSH-heavy or low-overhead environments.
Text.app is a simple text editor for Chrome OS and Chrome. It's fast, lets you open multiple files at once, has syntax highlighting, and saves to Google Drive on Chrome OS.
ConTEXT is a small, fast and powerful freeware text editor, developed to serve as a secondary tool for software developers.
Nota is a convergent text editor. Nota is easy to use, with a simple interface by default. Nota supports syntax highlighting for various languages, focus mode, annotations, configurable fonts, colors, a integrated side panel and more.
JOE is a full featured terminal-based screen editor which is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). JOE has been around since 1988 and comes standard with many Linux distributions.
Pe, short for Programmer’s Editor, is an open source text editor for BeOS. It is targeted towards source-code editing, and features syntax highlighting for a large number of programming languages. It also works as a basic source-level HTML editor, with some HTML autocompletion...
Vis aims to be a modern, legacy-free, simple yet efficient editor, combining the strengths of both vi(m) and sam. It extends vi's modal editing with built-in support for multiple cursors/selections and combines it with sam's structural regular expression based command...
This tool can transform texts into a variety of formats/structures. It can assist tasks of data formatting and coding. Formatting steps can be stored and reused. The tool includes text-to-speech of various languages.
Tincta is an elegant one-window text editor that is intuitive to use on personal tasks like writing blog posts, letters or grocery lists. But it also has all functionality you need for professional web design and programming.
Eddie is a programmers editor for Mac OSX and Gnome Linux. Inspired by the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, Eddie brings some of it's powerful features into a modern lightweight and capable programmer's editor.
Ynote Classic is an easy to use fast and advanced text editor with a tabbed interface and multiview. It has intelligent Syntax Highlighting, Code Folding , Auto Indent and autocompletion. It can highlight any language you like using Regular Expressions.
ne is a text editor based on the POSIX standard that runs (we hope) on almost any UN*X machine. ne is easy to use for the beginner, but powerful and fully configurable for the wizard, and most sparing in its resource usage.
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