Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca
Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#2The Hacker News community would do well to minimize discussions about optimal editors. It just isn't that interesting or important.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#3The Hacker News community would do well to minimize discussions about optimal editors. It just isn't that interesting or important.
When I consider the time spent in thinking about a line of code and typing it into my editor, I couldn't agree more.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#4The Hacker News community would do well to minimize discussions about optimal editors. It just isn't that interesting or important.
When I consider the time spent in thinking about a line of code and typing it into my editor, I couldn't agree more.
I agree with both of you, but I think it is wise to choose a good editor when you start. If the editor is any good, it can help you and reduce the time it takes to program, so more time is spent on thinking than typing. I'm sure you don't use Notepad or Nano.
But, yeah, dead topic to me, I already chose my editor and could care less what someone else says, only if it's about a new one, then I may care.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#5The Hacker News community would do well to minimize discussions about optimal editors. It just isn't that interesting or important.
Why do you say that? It would seem to me that editor choice can be as important as language choice, and understanding the features of the editor are important to fast, effective development. One of the most interesting articles I read this year was about editors.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#6The Hacker News community would do well to minimize discussions about optimal editors. It just isn't that interesting or important.
Why do you say that? It would seem to me that editor choice can be as important as language choice, and understanding the features of the editor are important to fast, effective development. One of the most interesting articles I read this year was about editors.
Neither choice matters much. Smart, flexible people tend to get the job done one way or another. If a bottleneck becomes apparent they work around it: revise, redesign, change languages, tools, editors as necessary.
Historically a lot of useless dogma and arguments have surrounded the choice of editor. There is a desire to avoid that sort of low-quality discussion.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#7The choice of editor matters in the sense that you would gain quite a lot by using an IDE with automated refactorings.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#8The choice of editor matters in the sense that you would gain quite a lot by using an IDE with automated refactorings.
Yes! Or, an IDE which integrates a debugging tool, key bindings, API-sensitive auto-complete, run-time manipulation, and many other language-specific features geared toward easing development in that language.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you say that? It would seem to me that editor choice can be as important as language choice, and understanding the features of the editor are important to fast, effective development. One of the most interesting articles I read this year was about editors.
Neither choice matters much. Smart, flexible people tend to get the job done one way or another. If a bottleneck becomes apparent they work around it: revise, redesign, change languages, tools, editors as necessary. Historically a lot of useless dogma and arguments have surrounded the choice of editor. There is a desire to avoid that sort of low-quality discussion.
Depends. Smart, flexible people can get the job done with any tool as long as that tool is "good enough". However, a bad tool will cripple even a good programmer.
The Emacs/vi/IntelliJ/Eclipse/Netbeans/Kate/jEdit/TextPad debate is meaningless, because all the above choices are "good enough". However, a decent programmer's productivity will be severely hampered by Notepad. Similarly, the Rails/Django/Pylons debate is pointless, but choosing JSF can easily kill your project.
Re: Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
#10The Hacker News community would do well to minimize discussions about optimal editors. It just isn't that interesting or important.
When I consider the time spent in thinking about a line of code and typing it into my editor, I couldn't agree more.
Yea... and then when you're finally know what to do, you're held back by bottlenecks and deficits of your editor/IDE. Doing "context switch" on your brain, switching from the problem you're programming to "how the heck do I tell it to stop auto-indenting 8char tabs?!" is frustrating. It's slowing you down. Things get only worse when you're dealing with many files.
It's not the "typing time" that good editors save you, it's the "thinking time" they save since you're not forced to think much about them.
When I was forced to switch from Visual Studio 6 to VS2003, my productivity really suffered. Things did not work the way I wanted and I kept cold-rebooting my brain after every little interruption. Now I'm switching to vim and while it may not be as "fast" for certain tasks, its consistency and transparency makes me forget it's there. Besides, by not relying on arrow keys, pageup/down, del/ins and so on, vim allows me to be equally productive on unknown keyboards, especially on laptops, easily switching computers, which I happen to do quite often.