One of my buddies likes to give me a hard time about my constant tinkering with new or different text editors. I’ve always had my preference of editor, but I love to see how others implement various concepts and what different ideas each one may have.

Since I do this stuff for my own entertainment and education anyway, I figured I may as well make this information useful to others as well. Starting Monday, May 26th, I’ll be using an reviewing one of four free and open source text editors in two week sprints and blogging about my findings with each editor.

The criteria of my text editor selections is that each one is free to use, completely open source, and is cross platform. The four text editors I’ve found that have made this list are Vim, Emacs, Light Table, and Atom. First up will be Light Table.

I’ll cover everything I can think of including acquiring the editor and configuring, day to day usage, and writing some type of plugin for each editor in its native scripting language.

Hopefully people find this helpful when evaluating their choices in editors.