(l-r) JavaScript in Atom; CSS in Sublime Text 2.

Developers love their code editors. It’s true. Code editors are like sports teams and devs are fiercely loyal. In recent years a new crop of editing tools has come into play so I decided to do a quick poll to see which ones are currently being used.

How?

I chose to put the poll on Google+ for a few reasons: 1) the HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript communities on Google+ collectively have hundreds of thousands of members, so I knew I’d get a good sampling, and, 2) Google+’s polling feature is very simple and compiles totals and percentages for each answer.

Methodology

The poll was a simple question: What code editor do you prefer? I offered four multiple choice answers:

Sublime Text

Atom

Brackets

Other (say in comments)

Google+ allows for up to five possible answers for each poll. I chose these three code editors to focus on thinking they would be in the higher percentile than others; I’d later realize that it was a bad assumption to make (more on that later).

Since comments were open to answer differently from the three main choices, I had to come up with a strategy for how to best track those answers:

If respondents added a comment with one of the three choices, I didn’t count it, thinking the respondent would’ve chosen that answer directly in the poll.

If respondents added a comment that included multiple answers, e.g., “WebStorm and NetBeans”, I counted only the first answer and discounted the last, thinking that the first would likely be the primary choice.

As you can see, this isn’t an exact science. But hey, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In some cases respondents indicated “Other” but didn’t add a comment with their answer. Also, as I was posting this in three different Google+ communities, there was the possibility of double-dipping; it’s likely members are in more than one of these communities. Since there’s no way to prevent a member of the JavaScript community from responding both there and also in the HTML5 community, I wasn’t going to worry about it.

I let the poll run for four days and collected approximately 4,500 responses before compiling results (Note: the poll is still running).

The results…

Logarithmic view of compiled results from three Google+ communities.

Over 25 different code editors were indicated so I’ve chosen to list just the top 10 responses. For the most part, these 10 were consistent across all three Google+ communities in order of popularity and relative usage.

As you can see, Sublime Text was the most popular response (50%), followed by Atom (20%) and Brackets (10%). But this is where the methodology and the polling tool could’ve skewed the results.

If I could’ve selected 6–8 different multiple choice answers, how different would the percentiles have been? For instance, Vim was a consistent write-in, but not everyone who selected “Other” left a comment. The same could be true for WebStorm and others.

Approximately 16% of the overall sampling selected “Other” but chose not to leave a comment with their preference. In the end, the top three responses also happened to be the first three listed on the poll; easy to select with nothing further from the respondent.

What does this tell us?

Well, in reality, not a lot. As I said, this isn’t a scientific poll and there are several mitigating factors that can skew the results.

Thierry Koblentz made an interesting point to me on this topic: “I think most [devs] don’t try that many, so their “preferred” one is limited to what they know, not what we have out there. And the language may also influence that choice.

“…Lisa may have tried Coda, Text Wrangler, Sublime, WebStorm and IntelliJ IDEA (her favorite being IntelliJ IDEA) while John is a die hard Sublime user after only trying Dreamweaver and Coda.

“Many Johns will skew the results leading people to think that Sublime is THE best IDE out there, but many Lisas will skew the results as well because she is a Java developer.”

It’s a point well taken.

So the winner is…

Who cares? If you have a particular code editor/IDE that you love and it does what you need it to do — linting, debugging, source control integration, launches rockets, etc. — then you have yourself a keeper.

I’ve personally changed editors 3–4 times in the last few years, once being diehard Sublime, then being diehard Brackets, to now being semi-diehard Atom, but still missing the Brackets integration and wishing for the JS debugging ecosystem in Sublime. As technologies change so do the necessary tools and features that devs rely on.