preferences and tools

In addition to the languages in which developers program, frameworks on which they build, and databases in which they persist information, there is also one's own working environment. The so-called development environment or the editor is certainly the central tool, but also the operating system on one's own laptop or the websites that one uses most often.

Development environments

Visual Studio Code is still in the lead, having overtaken IntelliJ again in 2021. 

If you group the mentions of the Jetbrains family (Intellij, PyCharm, PHPStorm, WebStorm, RubyMine, etc.), they are still right in front. Overall, however, the JetBrains family has lost a bit of percentage points.

2020			2021
IntelliJ	18.77%	397	Visual Studio Code	19.20%	345
Visual Studio Code	17.02%	360	IntelliJ	17.70%	318
Notepad++	12.01%	254	Notepad++	12.35%	222
Vim	7.99%	169	Visual Studio	7.62%	137
Visual Studio	7.42%	157	Vim	6.57%	118
Eclipse	5.53%	117	Eclipse	5.06%	91
Sublime Text	5.30%	112	Sublime Text	4.34%	78
PyCharm	3.83%	81	Android Studio	3.78%	68
Android Studio	3.78%	80	Other:	3.62%	65
PHPStorm	3.12%	66	WebStorm	3.56%	64
Other:	2.98%	63	PHPStorm	3.45%	62
WebStorm	2.65%	56	PyCharm	3.28%	59
Xcode	2.55%	54	Atom	2.45%	44
Atom	2.51%	53	Xcode	2.06%	37
IPython / Jupyter	1.47%	31	IPython / Jupyter	1.56%	28
NetBeans	0.76%	16	NetBeans	0.95%	17
RStudio	0.66%	14	Emacs	0.83%	15
Emacs	0.57%	12	Coda	0.45%	8
RubyMine	0.33%	7	RStudio	0.39%	7
TextMate	0.33%	7	RubyMine	0.33%	6
Coda	0.19%	4	TextMate	0.28%	5
Zend	0.14%	3	Komodo	0.06%	1
Komodo	0.09%	2	Zend	0.06%	1
Light Table	0.00%	0	Light Table	0.06%	1

Operating System

In terms of the operating system used by developers on their primary work device, Windows remains just above the 50 percent mark. Linux has lost one percentage point.

An interesting insight: if we filter the survey by participants from companies with fewer than 10 employees, the figure for mac OS rises to 54.55 percent and Windows drops to 33 percent. One could now assume that developers in very small companies are more likely to be able to decide freely about their choice of device and are then significantly more likely to choose macOS.

Considering that in the vast majority of companies only Windows laptops are provided by default and developers have to buy their own Apple laptops or ask for them, this figure does make you think. For the next survey, it would be good to know whether developers are forced to use a certain system on the desktop/laptop.

2020			2021
Windows	50.28%	363	Windows	50.81%	313
macOS / OS X	34.07%	246	macOS / OS X	34.25%	211
Linux	15.10%	109	Linux	14.12%	87
Other:	0.55%	4	Other:	1%	5

(Note: Those who, like me, expect systems like FreeBSD under "Other" will be disappointed; there are only four mentions of combinations of Linux, Mac and Windows. There was one mention of ChromeOS, although it should be mentioned here that it is based on Linux).

Websites

For easier grouping we have cut away the top level domain (.com/.ch etc.) this year and standardized all spellings as far as possible. Since these are free text fields, for a higher participation it would be worth considering to offer a pre-selection of e.g. 30 pages next year and developers can prioritize them. Because by the free text field the votes are distributed on too many web pages.

stackoverflow	54	stackoverflow	52
google	36	google	39
github	13	github	12
duckduckgo	5	baeldung	5
medium	4	duckduckgo	4
baeldung	3	docs.microsoft	4
developer.mozilla	3	developer.mozilla	3
jira	3	medium	2
gitlab	2	reddit	2
wikipedia	2	news.ycombinator	2
docs.microsoft	2	twitter	2
heise	2	youtube	1
news.ycombinator	1	microsoft	1
reddit	1	gitlab	1
php	1	jira	1
internal	1	angular	1
developer.android	1	spring	1
youtube	1	wikipedia	1
microsoft	1	w3schools	1
bitbucket	1	trello	1
trello	1	linkedin	1
linkedin	1	deepl	1
angular	1	cppreference	1
twitter	1	portal.azure	1
mail.google	1	caniuse	1
dzone	1	aws.amazon	1
docs.oracle	1	stackexchange	1
developer.apple	1	heise	1
dev.azure	1	ecosia	1
deepl	1	dict.leo	1
cppreference	1	dev	1
confluence	1	bitbucket	1
atlassian	1
wiki	1
intranet	1
dict.leo	1