It's listed as the third most popular IDE after Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio by respondents to Stack Overflow's annual survey. Interestingly, it's higher among professionals than learners. Maybe that's because learners are going to be using some of those newer AI-adjacent editors, or because learners are less likely to be using Windows at all.
I'm sure people will leap to the defense of their chosen text editor, like they always do. "Oh, they separated vim and Neovim! Those are basically the same! I can combine those, really, to get a better score!" But I think a better takeaway is that it's incredible that Notepad++, an open source application exclusive to Windows that has had, basically, a single developer over the course of 22 years, has managed to reach such a widespread audience. Especially when Scintilla's other related editors (SciTE, EditPlus) essentially don't rate.
I think the argument you made for combining vim and neovim is pretty good actually. But it seems pretty unique to those two editors (well, throw vi in there if it ever shows up on the chart), so “worst” case notepad++ would be bumped down just one spot.
If vim were good enough, neovim wouldn't exist. If neovim were that much better, vim wouldn't still be as popular as it is. And if neither of them did anything worth picking up, then vi would still outrank them.
The conclusion is that they don't do the same things. They just both have the vi interface. But having a vi interface isn't particularly weird anymore. SublimeText and vscode have vi bindings. So does PyCharm/IntelliJ. So does Notepad++! Heck, so does nano! So who gets to claim those editors? Vscode is the most popular editor that supports a vi-like interface. Shouldn't that mean that vscode is the best of the "vi descendants"? Or does it mean that all these people were okay with the vi interface, but had a good reason not to make the choice they did for another editor?
Fundamentally, the issue is: Either choice matters, or popularity doesn't matter. You can't have it both ways.
>Maybe that's because learners are going to be using some of those newer AI-adjacent editors, or because learners are less likely to be using Windows at all.
You can use the 2022 (ie. pre-chatgpt) results for control for that. The results are basically the same.
I love a feature of notepad++ where when you have documents open and exit, it won't bother you with a save dialog and when you open it again the previous state will be there. I found that mousepad on linux can do this.
For something functionality close I would look at Kate.
I love and hate it at the same time, just like my browser tabs hoarding, it means I currently have 218 open documents on Notepad++ (and 96 browser tabs). I might not even need them anymore, but it's always "I'll look at them... later".
For the browser you can use something like Session Buddy. Save the session and move on secure in the knowledge that the tabs are there IF you need them.
At least in past I gave up and just used N++ with Wine. It didn't fit the rest of system at all, but was more usable for editing simple text files than DE defaults of GEdit and Kate.
I enjoy coding something new up in Notepad++, without any annoying autocomplete and jank. I call it unplugged (acoustic?) mode. Jeepers Visual Studio these days starts autocompleting if and while for example and sometimes doesn't respect normal keystrokes because it expects me to complete these kind of interactions instead.
The cursor changes when you get to resizing corners and edges, so I don't suffer from the problem pointed out in the original article. However, I do find something annoying: sometimes when I'm resizing (or maybe dragging) a window, it gets expanded to fill the whole screen.
I think that kind of behaviour ought to be controlled by the green dot at the top-left of windows, not by some particular mouse movements.
There was a time when the changes to the mac UI were quite good, or at least not annoying. Sometimes it seems as though they are changing stuff just to change stuff.
The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).
I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.
I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.
That is because the purpose of meeting is often only to keep the big boss informed of what their team is doing. The team can operate without the meeting. The big boss cannot. Their job is to know what their team is doing.
I've been in academia for more decades than I'd like to state, and I have never heard of an institute that covered article processing charges. I work in a natural science. Maybe things are different in computing fields, though.
I use a phone app called 'transit' to find out where the buses are at any moment. It's a great app for a lot of reasons, but the reason I was drawn to it at first was their witty release notes.
As the author of an R package, my release notes are much drier and businesslike. The package is quite static, so releases are mainly bug fixes. I start each item with either 'Add' or 'Change', then I name the function, and then I supply a short descriptive phrase and end with a link to the github issue where where users can see why the change was made, and what the code differences were.
I realize that this is not an answer to the question, really, because all users of the R package are basically on an even footing, in terms of knowing the R language and the science that the package is intended to support. If there is something transferrable to the OP's use-case, I guess it is to be systematic and terse, and to use a fairly fixed way of writing (being aware that not all users have English as the first language).
I agree 100% with what I think is the key phrase, viz. "the results can change without any modification to your code".
I maintain an R package that is quite stable and is widely used. But every month or so, the GHA on one of the R testing machines will report an error. The messages being quite opaque, I typically spend a half hour trying to see if my code is doing something wrong. And then I simply make a calendar item to recheck it each day for a while. Sure enough, the problems always go away after a few days.
The oral discussion does not scale well in large classes. The solution is to stop using essays for evaluation, relying on (supervised) examinations instead.
Of course, there will be complaints from many students. However, as a prof for decades, I can say that some will prefer an exam-based solution. This includes the students who are working their way through university and don't have much time for busy-work, along with students who write their essays themselves and get lower grades than those who do not.
I just tried the same prompt in chatGPT and it gave 10 errors. Mostly they were because it was using `#` as a comment character, which suggests that it has not been given very much typst code to examine.
Yup, that's pretty bad. But, as an old fart with old eyes, I now use Safari and click the 'reader' version on many sites. Frankly, the web in it's early years was preferable to much of what I see nowadays. But, like I say, I'm an old fart. Heck, I used punch cards throughout my undergraduate days.
I've started using typst for small local documents that I would previously have written in markdown (or R-markdown). Typst offers programming features that are very helpful for small writing tasks that need more customization than markdown provides but that don't need the wildly expansive set of templates available in the latex world.
Like other academics, I plan to stick with latex for journal articles and books, unless publishers provide support for typst.
Markdown still has a place for files on github, because that means that web browsers will display formatted material, not just the raw code. A similar thing applies to code documentation, with many systems (R, Julia, etc) supporting various flavours of markdown.
I recommend typst to students for small tasks like assignments. It offers more typesetting power than markdown, it's a great replacement for msword, and it's easier to learn than latex.
Long story short, typst fills a niche. But it's not the be-all and end-all, at least in my (natural science) field.
> Like other academics, I plan to stick with latex for journal articles and books, unless publishers provide support for typst.
In my undergrad we sent all our essays etc as LaTeX and it was honestly very usable. I assume this was somewhat dependent on having a wealth of enthusiast professors and postgrads to develop the templates though...?
Since then, I've used LaTeX in a "freeform" way and absolutely hated it, I will definitely be trying Typst next time I need more than Markdown/RST.
But I can imagine that if you are unlucky, working with the journal-provided templates could be WORSE - if the templates suck you are surely in a world of pain!
LaTeX absolutely shines when you have someone providing a template; hardly anything comes close.
When you're on your own, you need to either steal someone else's and modify it, learn to build your own, or just use something like the Memoir package (which is the first but designed for it.)
I've never seen a publisher's template that was hard to work with.
The process of writing in latex for journals (and textbooks -- I've written for both things) is really very easy.
Publishers almost always provide a sample .tex file that has items you just fill in. For example, there will be something like
`\authorNames{}`
and you just put the names between the braces. The same goes for titles, equations, figures, etc. There will be sample paragraphs as well. And they will have examples of various citations styles, too.
Speaking of citations, latex has good support for citation databases. (Typst and markdown also provide this support.)
I'd say most people I know write their early drafts in latex. They have a target journal in mind from the start of the writing process, so they just grab the latest sample file and stylesheet(s) from the publisher's website and start entering text.
As you say, using latex for freeform documents is a different matter. That's where I've started to use typst. And I do recommend it for such things. You may find yourself wanting to make some typst templates for common tasks (meeting notes, position papers, etc.) but it's not terrible hard to make such templates. I've made a few, but often I don't bother -- I just put a few lines of customization at the start, if I want to alter how section headings look, or I want a different font from the default one.
I imagine that it would be productive to write a draft of a paper or book in Typist, and then do the painful LaTeX writing for the later and final drafts. The pain saved on early drafts would outweigh the cost of doing some work twice.
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