Perl IDE and Editor Poll, October 2009
In October 2009 we ran a poll asking people Which editor(s) or IDE(s) are you using for Perl development?. The poll was promoted via the blog of Gabor Szabo which is syndicated in several Perl related sites such as the Iron Man Challenge, Perlshpere and Planet Perl. It was also promoted via Twitter, the Perl group in Reddit, the Perl Mongers group in LinkedIn and the Perl Community Adserver to get more people to cast their vote. Request was also sent to the Perl Monger group leaders. Some of them have forwarded the request to their respective groups.
The list of editors was taken from the Perl Development Tools page on Perlmonks and the "randomize answers" checkbox was clicked after filling in the data. No idea if that really randomized the answers. During the poll people could mark other editors and type in the name of and editor. Some of these editors were added to the list of possible answers during the poll. In addition there were people who typed in the name of the editor in the other field even though the name appeared on the list.
At the begining we set the poll to allow multiple choice with up to 3 answers per person but later on we noticed that at one of the updates it became multiple choice unlimited answers. Unfortunatelly the free polling system we used gave details only on the number of answers and not the number of people who answered.
The poll ran between 21-24 October 2009 for about 72 hours. There were 3,234 answers when it was closed.
The results are as follows.
| Vim (or vi or gvim) | 1097 | 34% |
| Emacs (or xemacs, with or without extensions) | 430 | 13% |
| Ultra Edit (plain or Studio) | 224 | 7% |
| Eclipse EPIC | 210 | 6% |
| Other answer... | 143 | 4% |
| Notepad++ | 142 | 4% |
| Komodo IDE | 128 | 4% |
| Komodo Edit | 105 | 3% |
| TextMate | 105 | 3% |
| Padre | 101 | 3% |
| Kate | 56 | 2% |
| Gedit | 55 | 2% |
| TextPad | 49 | 2% |
| nano | 40 | 1% |
| SciTE | 38 | 1% |
| Geany | 36 | 1% |
| NEdit | 27 | 1% |
| mcedit | 26 | 1% |
| EditPlus | 26 | 1% |
| BBEdit | 25 | 1% |
| JEdit | 23 | 1% |
| Joe | 20 | 1% |
| Smultron | 16 | 0% |
| TextWrangler | 14 | 0% |
| PSPad | 12 | 0% |
| Notepad2 | 12 | 0% |
| Open Perl IDE | 10 | 0% |
| OptiPerl | 9 | 0% |
| Pico | 7 | 0% |
| Jed | 6 | 0% |
| Kephra | 6 | 0% |
| SlickEdit | 6 | 0% |
| KDevelop | 6 | 0% |
| Notepad | 5 | 0% |
| Crimson | 4 | 0% |
| Anjuta | 3 | 0% |
| EngInSite-Perl | 3 | 0% |
| KEdit | 3 | 0% |
| Perl Express | 2 | 0% |
| DzSoft Perl | 2 | 0% |
| PerlWiz | 1 | 0% |
| Far | 1 | 0% |
| Perl Studio | 0 | 0% |
| Perl Builder | 0 | 0% |
| Editeur | 0 | 0% |
| Perl Code Editor | 0 | 0% |
| ED for Windows | 0 | 0% |
| PerlEdit | 0 | 0% |
| FTE | 0 | 0% |
| visiPerl+ | 0 | 0% |
| Prof. Notepad | 0 | 0% |
| Perl Scripting Tool | 0 | 0% |
Comments
It would be much better to allow people to select primary IDE/editor and secondary IDE/editor than to allow multiple simple choices that does not distinguish between those two.
It was not a good idea to send the link to the actual poll. It should have been embedded in this page on perlide.org in order to increase linkage to it and so that we have good control over what is shown to people after the poll is closed.
Raw data
answers.csv and other.csv