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Vim 8.0 is coming

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Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#161
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it. Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer. And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++. It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial U…

So for me the question is why there are still people that enjoy working as if their computers are using a 25 year old developer experience. The GUI paradigm is over 30 years old. People still stick to the mouse even though we've had ubiquitous touchscreens for almost a decade. A good paradigm does not easily die.

>The GUI paradigm is over 30 years old. People still stick to the mouse even though we've had ubiquitous touchscreens for almost a decade.

Touch screens are not a 100% replacement for mice. They are an alternative, and for desktop/laptop PCs with vertical screens they are a non starter due to human physiology.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#162
post #10
post #4

I have vim, neovim and emacs (and spacemacs) installed. Right now I'm trying to get into emacs a bit more. What's interesting to me, and the reason I try to keep up to date with the latest changes for all four editors, is that it's been now, what, 25 years (?) since emacs and vim started "competing" and they still are. I guess we could be saying the same in 10 years about firefox and chrome, but it still is amazing i…

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it. Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer. And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++. It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial U…

At my last job, I was doing mostly Java server stuff.

I switched between Vim and Eclipse seamlessly, depending on what task I was trying to accomplish. Vim is better at plain text editing, Eclipse is better at navigating convoluted Java hierarchies or debugging Java code.

For me, those tools are not exclusive but complementary.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#163
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs ) both vi and Emacs are from 1976. 40 years this year!

vi is not Vim.

Actually it is.

Not only in the sense that Vim is a clone of vi (with added stuff), but more specifically in that in lots of distros the vi command is just vim (with some special flags).

Old BSD vi today is, and has been for over a decade or so, dead.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, I'm a programmer. I want to extend my tools with code, not configuration. The power of the command line is not so much that it's a command line -- the power is that it is a programmable environment. I'm not limited to configuring what the tools are doing on my behalf. I'm writing my own tools. I think this is the biggest draw for Emacs. It's a fully featured lisp development environment. If you want to…

> "I want to extend my tools with code, not configuration." You can do that with Visual Studio too with Visual Studio Extensions. You can also manage extensions (including those from other users) with a built-in package manager, just like in Emacs. Here's a Visual Studio Extensions tutorial if you're interested: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Buildi...

Yes, but writing a Visual Studio extension (or Eclipse, etc.) is much higher friction than Emacs. In emacs, I can just open a buffer in emacs-lisp-mode, write a quick function, immediately eval it and start using it. The instant feedback means that quick, small customizations are very low cost. It's like the difference between writing a code generator for Java vs using macros in Lisp.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#165
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's decidedly not true. Nor is this about customization of workflows. I am talking about actual unadulterated power to do things you cannot do in an IDE. All IDEs optimize for the average use case. If they do expose a set of advanced commands or transformations, they are hidden deep in the menus and what you can do with them is extremely rigid and limited. At most you have a few dozen commands (you would call them…

As parent said, good IDEs (like IDEA etc) can be customized to no end. You can remap pretty much all "menu" commands to shortcuts, and they have plenty of interfaces to extend their feature-set through plugins and custom commands to invoke the shell or what-have-you. Honestly, it's not a crime to like nice windows, y'know.

That's another misconception GUI people seem to have. You can have nice windows and color schemes in Terminal as well (even on Windows is you install MSYS2). Except you get absolute control over your windows layouts and behaviors with tmux and friends. And you don't have to reach for the mouse to interact with any of them.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#166
post #26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it. Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer. And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++. It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial U…

First of all, the key point of emacs is extensibility and customizability. So as new stuff comes up, e.g. new programming languages, debuggers, file formats, emacs can be extended without too much pain to work with them (and often, somebody has already done that for me). Secondly, working mainly as a sysadmin and only sometimes doing some development, I do far more with emacs than coding. I edit configuration files,…

> the key point of emacs is extensibility and customizability

This really can't be overstated, or its value emphasized too strongly, and it goes a lot further than your simple statement makes clear.

There is literally nothing in Emacs whose source code is not trivially accessible from the editor itself, via the documentation attached to whatever functions or variables are related to the behavior of interest. (Even the C source code is accessible in this way, if you have it somewhere on your system and have told Emacs where to find it. Or, if you build from source, it will remember on its own.) You can access the documentation for anything, including keybindings, with a single command, and follow a hyperlink from there to the Emacs Lisp or C source in which it's implemented.

This reduces the mystery of why and how Emacs does what it does effectively to zero. If you don't understand why your last keystroke did what it did, you can find out. (If you're not sure what your last keystroke was, you can find that out too, because Emacs keeps track and will happily show you with M-x view-lossage.) If you don't understand how it did what it did, you can find that out, too. And if you want to modify what it does, there's a wide variety of ways you can do that, as well. Nothing in Emacs is inaccessible; nothing in Emacs is immutable. The only thing that can stop you, or even slow you down, from making Emacs exactly the tool you want it to be, is your own level of understanding and capability - and if you find it lacking, Emacs is there to help, and its community will cheerfully do likewise. (Oh, and the long-form manuals for everything in Emacs are built into Emacs, too.)

I've built several Emacs packages, and released a couple on MELPA to quiet but generally positive receptions - nothing particularly big or world-shattering, just small things to make other Emacs users' lives a little easier, or a little more fun. Almost everything I know about extending Emacs, I've been able to learn from Emacs itself, in the course of seven or so years of using Emacs. I can't think of another editor I've ever used, or even heard of, in which that would be possible. Considering the central position a programmer's primary editor occupies in her professional armamentarium, it's hard to imagine any other editor that'd do even half as much as Emacs to help me get my work done.

As you say, if I had to work in Java or C#, I'd probably find myself having to use Eclipse or IntelliJ or Visual Studio or what-have-you. It's not going too far to say that one reason I'm largely unwilling to work in those languages is because I wouldn't easily be able to do so in Emacs. That may strike some people as an astonishing assertion, and a foolish attitude toward choice of language. That's reasonable enough, but I misdoubt most experienced Emacs users would find themselves feeling much the same way.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#167
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, vim is not strictly vi although they were related. Amazing, I was 1 year old when both were started. How many other software package has such longevity? Unix and its various guises?

I have a better question. Will those tools be still used in 40 years? And what modern tools will be used after that time?

As long a there are keyboards, there will be Vim.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#168
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, the key point of emacs is extensibility and customizability. So as new stuff comes up, e.g. new programming languages, debuggers, file formats, emacs can be extended without too much pain to work with them (and often, somebody has already done that for me). Secondly, working mainly as a sysadmin and only sometimes doing some development, I do far more with emacs than coding. I edit configuration files,…

I'm about to dive into org mode for the first time today. Do you have any tips for learning it? My plan was to open up the manual and start reading, but maybe you found an article or tutorial that helped kickstart your org mode knowledge, so I thought I'd ask. (Apologies if the question is a bit offtopic.)

The Org documentation is a great place to start, but this comment opened my eyes to things I was doing wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11386943

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#169
post #55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You edit text. That's a big part of your "developer experience", and XCode/IntelliJ don't really change that. Most of their innovations focus on the high-level, and they tend to be serious let down when it comes to straight-forward text manipulation. No progress since CUA there. Using a SmallTalk system was a somewhat different experience. Now that was integrated .

Smalltalk started the whole IDE idea actually. The VM ( or image) is the run time and the editor at the same time. The level of integration and introspection made the whole thing very powerfull and inspired other IDEs to have this features, which without the software development could have been very slow.

I'm not sure this is a good idea.

I took a class that used Pharo and made my workspace freeze a couple of times.

A remote protocol talking to a 2nd vm would have been better.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#170
post #10
post #4

I have vim, neovim and emacs (and spacemacs) installed. Right now I'm trying to get into emacs a bit more. What's interesting to me, and the reason I try to keep up to date with the latest changes for all four editors, is that it's been now, what, 25 years (?) since emacs and vim started "competing" and they still are. I guess we could be saying the same in 10 years about firefox and chrome, but it still is amazing i…

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it. Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer. And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++. It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial U…

You seem to be under the impression that Emacs and Vim haven't been improving over all those years.

Yes, they still keep their keybindings, which don't match the common "modern" editors, but honestly, that's a big part of what people like about them.

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