I am about to start the writeup of my thesis. I have tried many LaTeX editors over the years but am yet to find one that I like.
I want to be able to type in code with proper syntax highlighting, code completion etc like a programming IDE, and see the rendered results immediately.
Atom (https://atom.io/) and Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com) will have plenty of packages that you can install to make it more IDE-like.