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My thoughts about editors in 2020

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Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#41

Post by sodapopcan »

YZF wrote: post #17
mixmastamyk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things are often huge, slow, and take a long time to learn—not all sunshine and roses. When the control panel has search you know you're in one. All a tradeoff of course.

Huge but not really slow. They automate a lot of common tasks, super fast searches/navigation, refactoring etc. Code analysis is just there. Often my fellow non-IDE users struggle to find the piece of code when we're chatting whereas for me navigating or finding things anywhere in a really large code base is pretty much instant. I stopped pointing it out unless it's a good friend I just want to rib a little.

Most non-IDE users I meet IRL don't take the time to beef up their tool and actually learn how to properly use it. There are also those who flat out refuse to install any plugins, for example, plugins that could make searching large codebases very fast. I don't understand these people, but to each their own! Of course, the whole reason many people chose an editor over an IDE is because they don't want to learn an IDE so, not much you can do there. I've worked with plenty of people who use an IDE and barely using any of its features.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#42

Post by drewm1980 »

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

If you can't learn to love vim keybindings, you're not going to love vim; they are the primary selling point of the editor. Once you learn them you will want them everywhere. It's about wanting the best parts of VIM and an IDE (I don't think that has been achieved though).

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#43

Post by ketzo »

agumonkey wrote: post #37
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.

Totally unrelated, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen “edition” used in that way, as the noun form of “to edit.” Neat.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#44

Post by drevil-v2 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #10
kaesar14 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s always seemed silly to me not to use tools that make your job easier. JetBrains products are the most powerful software I have to get my work done.

Those things are often huge, slow, and take a long time to learn—not all sunshine and roses. When the control panel has search you know you're in one. All a tradeoff of course.

Jetbrains IDE's definitely aren't slow. You need to change the default memory heap sizes.

Same codebase loaded up in Webstorm vs VS Code and I can't see any difference.

Webstorm took about 10-20 seconds to index it but their implementation of the AST is unbelievable. So much more powerful than VS Code. I get code completion in way more places than VS Code and even when they both provide options Webstorm takes the local context into account and much more accurate than VS Code. Refactoring is breeze.

There is no comparison. I happily pay the initial load up time in the morning for smoother ride for the rest of the day.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#45

Post by agumonkey »

ketzo wrote: post #43
agumonkey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally unrelated, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen “edition” used in that way, as the noun form of “to edit.” Neat.

good point, I shall edit that mistake

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#46

Post by baby »

candiddevmike wrote: post #16
baby wrote: post #14

I spent some time learning emacs, and I use it every time I'm in the terminal and need quick access to a file, or SSH into a machine, but there's no way I'll ever spend the time to make it my main editor. The learning curve is not steep, it's fixed to a "hard" mode: every new plugin you want to try, you'll have to figure out how to use and there'll be some time adaptation to learn new shortcuts. While I don't see the…

Good news, you can do remote development in VSCode: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview

holy shit! Thanks so much, this is awesome!

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#47

Post by Donckele »

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…

> Also, I feel like I do more reading code and debugging than writing nowadays, and I am not bothered by my speed at writing code.

Well, I write more code so my experiences are not the same as yours.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#48

Post by mark254 »

jeffbee wrote: post #28
mantap wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important lesson with vim is that you should be able to edit faster than you can think. It doesn't matter whether you use vim keybindings or emacs keybindings, or whatever, just that you have replacements for the functionality so that your brain can be free to think about the problem at hand rather than the nifty-gritty of editing text.

> edit faster than you can think ^^^ The explanation for absolutely every failure of our industry right there in six words.

I guess what was meant is "reduce cognitive overhead for editing, so that the brain can keep the actual programming task in short-term memory".

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#49

Post by addicted »

kstrauser wrote: post #13

I stopped reading when they wrote that they preferred modal editors because they hate navigating with arrow keys. Uh, I use to live in Emacs and now I use VS Code, and you could remove my arrow keys for all I’d care (or notice). Those are entirely orthogonal, like “I prefer cars to bikes because I like tires.”

How do you navigate text in VSCode without arrow keys (and equivalents such as Pg Up/Dn, Home, End)

I’m not sure about the author, but I consider emacs essentially a modal editor. The vast majority of actions are preceded by a combination of modifier key presses, which is essentially modal, except you can’t (or can you?) keep it sticky.

So, for example, next line in Emacs is Ctrl+N whereas in Vim is Esc+J. The only difference in VIM is that you don’t need to hit ESC the next time want to go to the next line whereas Emacs reverts you to “insert” mode requiring you to press Ctrl again. But in both you can type out a number to allow you to jump 5 lines instead of just 1 with each key press.

Of course, those are only the in built modes. In many ways, emacs is even more modal than Vim, since there are so many packages that shift you into different custom modes With different behavior (e.g. org mode, magit, etc).

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#50

Post by pritambaral »

ketzo wrote: post #43
agumonkey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally unrelated, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen “edition” used in that way, as the noun form of “to edit.” Neat.

That's because it's wrong. The correct noun is 'editing'.
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