Your editor is where you spend most of your working day, so the choice matters more than most tooling debates suggest. After twelve years of switching, settling and switching again, here is how I think about the landscape.
Lightweight editors win for the web
For HTML, CSS and JavaScript work, a fast editor with good extensions beats a heavy IDE. Startup time, multi-cursor editing and an integrated terminal cover 90% of daily needs. The extension ecosystem — linters, formatters, Git integration — closes the rest of the gap.
Full IDEs earn their place on big codebases
When a project grows past a few dozen modules, refactoring tools, jump-to-definition and real debugging stop being luxuries. If you maintain large React apps or work across languages, a full IDE pays for itself within weeks.
- Pick the editor your team already knows before chasing features.
- Learn ten keyboard shortcuts deeply instead of fifty shallowly.
- Keep settings in sync across machines from day one.
- Revisit the choice yearly — the landscape moves fast.
My current setup
A lightweight editor for sites and snippets, a full IDE for app work, and the same theme, font and keybindings in both. Consistency beats novelty: the best editor is the one that disappears while you think.