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Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

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61–70 of 89 posts

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good grief. Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community, and no one is predicting that they will regain market share. And back to the original article, live programming and rich editing experiences is the future; emacs and VIM will go the way of the typewriter and x-terminal.

Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community The quality of the developer community seems to have gone down since the 90s. Maybe the OP should have stated "Eventually every great developer's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position." At least, this has been my experience. live programming and rich editing experiences is the future I was pre…

>The quality of the developer community seems to have gone down since the 90s. Maybe the OP should have stated "Eventually every great developer's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position." At least, this has been my experience.

To quote Jack Churchill (during WII) "any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly armed."

> I was previously assured that VPLs were the future.

They are. Its just that we are getting the VPL features that we want (live programming and rich editing experiences) in editors for our textual languages instead.

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#62

Eventually everyone's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position. All these editors like Sublime Text 2, Chocolat, Light IDE, Cloud9, etc fail at very basic task: sticking around. They also fail at another task: being available everywhere. If a new decent editor shows up, it wont be shiny, it wont grab headlines on HN with a fancily designed website, it will simply grow popular slowly, be added to pa…

If vim actually supported other keyboard formats properly (rather than making the user redefine them from scratch) I would switch in a heartbeat. But until then, vim is useless to me.

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good grief. Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community, and no one is predicting that they will regain market share. And back to the original article, live programming and rich editing experiences is the future; emacs and VIM will go the way of the typewriter and x-terminal.

>> Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community My Google-Fu is coming up short, i can't corroborate this. Can you provide any links to data confirming this claim up? I took a stab at getting some stats by searching stack overflow / server fault / super user for vim questions, emacs questions, textmate and sublime, vim comes out top by a long way, emacs next,…

No surprise that there are lots of questions about VIM, it has a really sharp learning curve. You didn't include Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc...which is a significant omission.

This is all informal and anecdotal, but I'll try to explain my reasoning/experience. In the mid/early 90s, you weren't really a great programmer unless you used a real text editor, so we would all eventually evolve into using Emacs (or VIM for the more daring). But then in 1997, Visual Studio got support for code completion (in VB), and Java and even C++ eventually followed. These language editors improved productivity for programming in those languages so much that it was hard to be competitive staying on Emacs. So perhaps most (~90%) of the Java/C#/C++ code written today is done with a well supported language aware editor (Eclipse, Visual Studio, JetBrains, ...).

Of course, if you are programming in a dynamic language, or a language with lousy tool support (C), then the language-aware editor doesn't really give you much (no static type system --> no static type feedback). There is a greater chance you are programming in Emacs (or VIM), but then you might not want to bother with the learning curve, or you might want something with a more modern non-ASCII UI, so maybe you are programming in Sublime or TextMate. There is nothing really wrong with this, you can be a great developer and prefer to avoid UX-archaic tooling, especially if you happen to also be a strong designer. There are strong trends away from text-based tools to visual tools, and I have no reason to believe that this isn't at play here.

The emacs community is vocal, and is particularly magnified in my field (systems/PL/PhD-level computer science) and demagnified at my place of employment (Microsoft, though keep in mind MSR has lots of Emacs/VIM users). But look at what the students prefer: they have no patience to learn these weapons from a more civilized time. They'll take whatever is the path of least resistance, and honestly who blames them!? Its not like they are losing much.

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Sublime on Linux/OS X/Windows. Please tell me more about how my editor of choice isn't available everywhere? If you're a sysop, or a devop and you spend a non-trivial amount of time remoted to strange and random servers then learning vim or emacs is a good choice. Unless its a Windows server.

I'm increasingly using Linux on ARM devices. Sublime Text 2's non-support for ARM has really been limiting its usefulness for me lately.

Could always ping the developers a feature request, they seem to like hearing from the community and reacting to people's needs.

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good grief. Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community, and no one is predicting that they will regain market share. And back to the original article, live programming and rich editing experiences is the future; emacs and VIM will go the way of the typewriter and x-terminal.

Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community The quality of the developer community seems to have gone down since the 90s. Maybe the OP should have stated "Eventually every great developer's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position." At least, this has been my experience. live programming and rich editing experiences is the future I was pre…

"The quality of the developer community seems to have gone down since the 90s."

Really? Can you back this up? As it seems to me the community is more engaged, productive and delivering high quality code. Yes, there's a lot more bad code as well, but that seems to be proportional to the increase in developers.

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#66

Eventually everyone's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position. All these editors like Sublime Text 2, Chocolat, Light IDE, Cloud9, etc fail at very basic task: sticking around. They also fail at another task: being available everywhere. If a new decent editor shows up, it wont be shiny, it wont grab headlines on HN with a fancily designed website, it will simply grow popular slowly, be added to pa…

I use Emacs, Vim and ST2 all the same, and most of the time, ST2 lets me do the same editing task with simpler keystrokes.

So my fingers don't look as busy as when using Vim, but I'm actually doing the same thing and postponing RSI.

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Who uses terminals these days?! Except just about every developer I know.

Disclaimer: Every is defined as not including a lot of developers on Microsoft platforms, web developers, Java Enterprise developers etc ...

embedded...

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Who uses terminals these days?! Except just about every developer I know.

Disclaimer: Every is defined as not including a lot of developers on Microsoft platforms, web developers, Java Enterprise developers etc ...

[deleted]

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#69
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it can survive long enough to accumulate enough plugins I don't think I'll ever understand why people would invest time (e.g., hundreds of hours over the course of years) extending closed source software over which they have so little control. So many people used TextMate until the development slowed. And now these same people seem to have jumped to Sublime Text. Did they port all the TextMate plugins they had…

AFAIK, text mate bundles can be dropped into ST2.

I think themes and snippets are compatible, but not full plugins.

Re: Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)

#70
post #20

How hard would it be for someone to build and IDE (with nice code browser, refactoring and all the smart stuff... like JetBrains products) on top of or incorporating an editor like Sublime or Textmate? I'd pay an arm and leg for IDEA or PyCharm with Sublime as the text editor (or something else with multiple cursors and all the "shiny" editor stuff), and the ability to launch either the full IDE or just the editor an…

There's a Steve Yegge rant on that topic. It would be much easier to add first class support to a language if its implementation exported the internal data it creates from running/compiling the programs.

Without it, we are left with hacks, or lots of work for every new language, like Eclipse, which Yegge says has 3 Java compilers inside.

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