Back, back, back in the day of my distant coding past I vaguely remember coding on vt100 (or possibly vt52) based terminals. The screen could display 24 lines with 80 characters across. Fixed width. Font colour was white and then green and then amber as time went on. Amber was much nicer on the eyes; less glare. Systems developed and environments got nicer to look at. I sometimes wonder if I have monitor burn-in on my eyes from those olden days :) Trying to keep track of a big program on the small screen was hard and I used to print out the code regularly just so I could keep track across multiple sections.

Today I can edit code on a 24″ monitor using a specially designed code editor with colour coding for different parts of the code. It’s all about the pretty.It still feels like sheer luxury to open up a large html file, fully expanded for the 24″, and have everything colour-coded. I can see so much more of the environment and track changes much easier.

I only do coding stuff occasionally and until recently I mostly used text editors including Programmer’s Notepad and vi. I still like them, though I tend to use programmer’s notepad as more of a jotting/working pad on windows, with occasional coding duties. I recently installed Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code as they open sourced it and seem to be updating regularly. It looks pretty and so far seems to be working well for my rudimentary requirements.