Editors and IDEs

Overview

We encourage everyone to use the right tools for the job, and since everyone here does a lot of writing, using the correct editor for you is really important. Developers will have more specialized needs, but everyone at GitLab needs to write Markdown, and the best text editors make this much easier.

A good editor/IDE will have:

  • syntax highlighting, showing structure as well as content
  • plugins to enable customization (such as spell-checking)
  • integration with git, enabling managing commits and branches from within the editor
  • the ability to open very large files efficiently
  • not require a persistent internet connection
  • powerful and fast search facilities
  • the ability to automatically navigate between code declarations and usages in a large codebase

Many editors are free to use, some require paid licenses to unlock all features. GitLab team members can expense the cost of their tools, and in some cases we have licenses we can hand out (for example, for JetBrains IDEs).

There are many, many good text editors.

Sub-pages

See the following sub-pages for details on editors and IDEs used with GitLab

Last modified May 20, 2023: Fix link to JetBrains licenses (011be98f)