Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is an open-source multipurpose code editor. It has many useful built in features, but becomes extremely powerful when you use plugins. I believe for many of R users it will the answer for "what Python editor should I use?". And you may end up using it for absolutely everything.

VS Code is mostly universal

Many of us end up working in many different languages, whether it is Python/R for our analysis, Java for web apps, or shell scripts for high performance computing. VS Code is smart, and knows what a huge range of languages are supposed to look like.

VS Code plugins

Plugins add numerous amazing features to VS Code.

My favourite plugin is GitLens. This plugin provides excellent git integration, but the standout feature is the git blame functionality. When you mouseover each line, you can see the author, the age, and the commit associated with it in a tooltip. This feature is absolutely amazing, and I find myself going back and forth between RStudio and VS Code just so I can take advantage of this.

There are also numerous plugins for code formatting, spell checking, and linting. These can be very useful, especially if you are working with a language you are slightly less familiar with and have to deal with yet another weird syntax and new line standard.

For the Vim fanatics, there is even a Vim emulator plugin. I haven't used it, but it looks promising (editor's note: I've used it and it does a good job of providing the core Vim functionality).