I write code with Vim and find no better alternatives to it, but when writing blog posts, it doesn’t feel right. I haven’t thought about the deep reason on this feeling yet, perhaps engineering code and blog writing take different logic or structure.

My blog is built with Jeykll and Markdown, so I explored many Markdown editors including gedit, Typora, MarkText, just to name a few. Well, I use Ubuntu, so the choices are pretty much limited.

There are plenty of superior Markdown editors on macOS, but I don’t think I would use them even if I switched to macOS. Because another most important factor affecting my choices is open source. Then obviously I won’t switch to macOS neither.

I don’t use Visual Studio Code on programming, because I’m so used to Vim for almost 15 years. However I already have Code installed on my Ubuntu just in case I could use it occasionally, like opening some Code projects from GitHub.

Yesterday, when I made a decision on writing daily, I found no proper editors, because I have uninstalled them after tried out. Then I opened Code by accident, and thought why not give this high-performance editor a try. After all, I have tried to write Markdown with Atom.

Then I modified some preferences solely for writing purpose and I was totally amazed! It’s flawless as butter. Open source, high performance, good spell checker, easy shortcuts, beautiful interface, outline navigator, and even git integration! What else do I want?

Typora should obviously not be in my radar, as it’s not open sourced. However it is one of rare macOS programs that have Linux port, so I have tried it for a while. But its performance is not comparable to Code, and I’m not so accustomed to its configurations, maybe it’s a macOS software or a editor designed for writers, that is to say not engineer friendly.

MarkText is open source, but it always have weird behaviors, e.g. it will delete blank lines which I want them there, and it doesn’t even show a confirmation dialog. A good editor should never modify content without informing users.

Atom was too slow, so I didn’t even write much with it.