Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My thoughts about editors in 2020

phaazon.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 71 posts

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#31

Post by hardwaregeek »

I love my emacs commands and I have a .emacs file with various snippets and packages like any good user, but I've been finding myself using it less and less.

First it started with front end development. I couldn't get emacs to play nice with syntax highlighting modern front end. I could get JSX highlighted OR I could get TypeScript highlighted. Not both. I started using WebStorm and discovered that the emacs keybindings were pretty good! Not perfect but the best I've found outside of emacs. And the refactoring! So nice, so convenient.

I still used emacs for various languages. Ruby, Python, then some Rust. I wrote a solid amount of Rust in emacs. But then my Rust projects started growing, I started wanting automatic refactors and good type info. A couple times setting up language servers on emacs had chastened me. So I switched to IntelliJ Rust. And damn, it's really nice. Same decent emacs keybindings, with really good language tooling. I can see the inferred type of a variable while I'm typing it out. I can refactor without having to run cargo all the time.

At this point I use emacs for writing blog posts, Python/Ruby, and config files. That's it. Oh and debugging wasm binaries. Hexl-mode is still unrivaled. It's a little sad though. I learned to program as I learned emacs. I like the idea of having a powerful, text crunching editor. But it's so damn inconvenient. Everything feels a little tacked on. Language servers are super brittle and hard to get right. Multiple cursors mostly work but aren't the first class citizens of IntelliJ.

If I had to provide a thesis on why emacs is failing me, it's because emacs was designed to manipulate text. It's incredibly good at that. But code these days isn't text. It's hypertext. It's a code graph that is automatically formatted, refactored and linked. Emacs can certainly treat code that way, but it's a lot of work and a lot of suffering that IDEs provide out of the box.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#35

Post by GolDDranks »

I realised that the reason why I haven't bothered to learn powerful keyboard-based navigation controls, is because I'm almost totally distanced myself from using a normal mouse. I love using MacBook Pro trackpad more, and I feel restrained every time I use mouse.

This also affects the amount of hand movement: the trackpad is a lot closer to the keyboard, so navigating with it doesn't bother me that much. In the long run, I'm sure that learning stuff like the author would be a nice boost, but I don't simply feel the need.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#36

Post by dijit »

MrOxiMoron wrote: post #34

It's funny how people who know vim expect every other editor to have support for it's keybindings too, while I as a non vim user am expected to love and learn vim keybindings

Not entirely sure how true that is.

I’m a heavy vim user and I love it, but that’s me.

I work with people who can navigate codebased absurdly swiftly and debug things faster than I ever could, and they use visual studio keybindings.

It’s all about knowing your tools; I’m a sysadmin so vim (Or, vi) has a high value for me as learning the keybindings makes me more powerful on my entire fleet.

For developers though? Debugging and codebase navigation is significantly more valuable- you read more than you write.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#37

Post by agumonkey »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #2

My thoughts after coding for 15 years now... I still can’t be bothered to learn emacs or vim. I’ve tried and it just never sticks. I remember fewer commands in vim than I knew 10 years ago. I really like smart IDE’s like IntelliJ and pycharm. I’m doing a typescript project in VSCode and the refactoring and code understanding is just... not enough. I agree with James Gosling’s opinion of heavy IDE’s. They help me. I’m…

It's funny how people can differ. I despise IDE so much .. sometimes with good arguments (non ergonomic, non helpful, bloated, non customizable, configuration hidden somewhere..).

I found vim edition natural, emacs programmability very natural. But it's true there was a holier than thou at first.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#38

Post by msla »

> Even though it could be seen as a positive point, I think that all the great plugins emacs has make it very bloated, and that’s a problem to me. For instance, Org-mode, which is a wonderful piece of software, should have benefited much more people if it was a standalone application. To me, it feels like starting using emacs will lead to using your computer to run emacs, and all your applications inside emacs. It even has an IRC plugin and an email reader plugin!

That's the point, yes.

Emacs' philosophy isn't so much text editing as it is using text as a convenient representation of something else and then having a powerful set of text-editing primitives you can use to manipulate whatever it is you're using text to represent. Living inside Emacs means always getting to use those customized, "slick" (in the author's words) text editing commands to do everything.

Emacs has gotten to where Web browsers are going, except Emacs isn't evil unless you actively make it so. ;)

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#39

Post by Izkata »

m463 wrote: post #9

I've been using emacs or vi for a long time. emacs is my primary editor. I used to use vi/vim more, because it is available just about everywhere and it's great for quickly editing a config file on a remote system. But once I started using tramp, I now use emacs for all systems. Tramp is a built-in way of editing files on remote systems using ssh as the transport. I can edit remote config files on dumb iot devices th…

> But once I started using tramp, I now use emacs for all systems.

> Tramp is a built-in way of editing files on remote systems using ssh as the transport. I can edit remote config files on dumb iot devices that don't run much more than busybox - with highlighting and undo and all the full-featured stuff.

> open /ssh:foo:.profile to edit your profile on remote system foo.

Vim does it through scp:

  vim scp://user@host//path/to/file
I don't usually use it (since vim is pretty much guaranteed to be installed remotely anyway), so I don't know what pitfalls/weirdness may exist, I just know it has the functionality.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#40

Post by spfzero »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #2

My thoughts after coding for 15 years now... I still can’t be bothered to learn emacs or vim. I’ve tried and it just never sticks. I remember fewer commands in vim than I knew 10 years ago. I really like smart IDE’s like IntelliJ and pycharm. I’m doing a typescript project in VSCode and the refactoring and code understanding is just... not enough. I agree with James Gosling’s opinion of heavy IDE’s. They help me. I’m…

Coding for many more than 15 years, use vim. Would never tell others to use it, its individual. For me, the speed, power, and omnipresence of it, makes it worth spending the time to master it. My workflow makes it important to be editing a file within a second of realizing I want to. Launching an IDE is way too much friction.
Post reply on HN