Comment by Surac

If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.

If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.

LazyVim is about as easy as it gets in the Vim space for a fully-fledged (but customizable) editor.

https://www.lazyvim.org/installation

Then run `LazyExtras` and you get a prompt that shows things like:

  Recommended Languages: (2)
    ○ lang.docker    mason.nvim  nvim-lspconfig  nvim-treesitter  none-ls.nvim  nvim-lint
    ○ lang.toml    nvim-lspconfig

Hit x against a couple and you're off to the races.

[lang.docker and lang.toml are examples of things you're selecting, the list after is what is being installed and configured for that thing]

For things like integrating a debugger, or to run your tests directly inline from the editor might require more customisation though.

I've been having a very good time with Zed. Great vim motion support, and fast to the point where using VSCode feels like driving a semi truck by comparison.

https://zed.dev

For TUI, Helix has a lovely out-of-the-box experience. What little config there is (two TOML files) is relatively easy to grasp. The main barrier you'll face is setting up your LSPs, which need to be installed manually. (Luckily, there's `uvx -q` for Python LSPs.)

For GUI, Zed is also really nice, has a great Vim mode, and auto-installs anything you might need. It loses a couple of points to VS Code on account of not being arbitrarily extensible, although that can also be seen as a plus, as it prevents extensions from randomly slowing everything down.

I’ve been using Zed [1] for some time now. They are also pretty AI focused so it may only be a matter of time, but so far I’ve been able to disable all of the AI interactions.

[1] https://zed.dev/

I'm a Kate zealot, if you're on Linux it's great with some LSP servers. The plugins/extensions are nice. There are also macOS and Windows builds.

For the terminal, micro is nice if you're used to GUI editors.

What do you mean by "extensive install requirements"...

Anyway Zed is a good option.

VSCodium has been my go-to. VS Code was great for a bit but (even long before this) it was already suffering from the cancer that is "being a microsoft product" and it was being bloated to death like everything else they ship, but VSCodium seems to keep enough distance to be immune. Will it stay that way? Who's to say. I hope so though.