The Verdict
GUI text editors
A
tom and Visual Studio Code represent the new generation of text editors, with their modern user interfaces along with extensible functionality through plugins. Ironically, these text editors, in some ways, recall the earliest era of textmode text editors because they encourage you to keep your hands on the keyboard for much of the time while at the same time encouraging the user to customise the environment for the current task. Geany, Notepadqq and Kate are representative of the older approach to how GUI text editors look and work.
We’ve chosen Visual Studio Code as the overall winner. Practically any advantage that other software has can be overcome by tracking down and installing a plugin from its vast collection. The downside is that its user interface imposes a certain way of working that, although popular at the moment, isn’t to everyone’s taste. When it comes to text editing, absolute beginners could find themselves struggling initially, because the program lacks toolbars with icons, coupled with the huge number of features and options. Using Visual Studio Code as the source code editor in Unity really shows off what it can do, and once set up with the right plugins, over and over again, it seems to guess what you need to type next and point out errors before the compiler is even invoked.