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My thoughts about editors in 2020

phaazon.net

61–70 of 71 posts

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searching can be handled with ag or ripgrep and used anywhere with any text files, with only a terminal.

That was essentially what I was getting at :) ...the difference being those who have these wired up into their text editors vs those who have to context switch between editor and terminal.

One skill can be used anywhere, another not. Your context switch is exaggerated as well, unless you consider a find dialog one.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#62
post #39
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/…

thank you, I learned something new today.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#63

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 d…

All of the most common Emacs movement keys work in VS Code (^n, ^p, ^a, ^e, etc.).

I see what you're saying about Emacs's modes, but understand that that's a different meaning of "modes" than people common use when talking about editors. By the definition you gave, I couldn't really think of _any_ editor that's not modal in some way.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#64
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…

Emacs has something like that as well with the right plugins. Ctrl+h f then fuzzy type what you want to do. Or, like usual, alt+x then start typing to just execute that command instead of reading about it. You just need the plugin Helm, or Ivy. I use Doom Emacs, and this functionality is built in. I use it all the time. Same story with config variables, except it's ctrl+h v instead of f.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#65
post #38

> 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 ev…

[deleted]

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#66
post #58
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ace jump has become a very welcome nature for jumping to a spot.

But it only works on what you can currently see, right? Or does ace jump work differently than I recall. isearch moving you along further in the buffer interactively as you type is far more useful than searching what you just see, and typing rando letters that appear. If it's on the wrong entry with the same word, I just hit C-s again - which is very fast to type repeatedly (rather than ace's find the right letter co…

Fair. ace-search which has a delay to turn into ace-jump is what I actually use. With enough characters, defaults to helm-swoop.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#67
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.

It's hard to imagine the slowness isn't outweighed by the speed gains from Intellisense and automatic refactoring tools.

with Webstorm / IntelliJ you can write first using placeholder variable names in a single file. One click to rename the variable and all references throughout the app. Drag the file to a different folder and imports are fixed everywhere. Want to move a single function to a different file? One click or keyboard shortcut and you're there.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#68

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.

It's hard to imagine the slowness isn't outweighed by the speed gains from Intellisense and automatic refactoring tools. with Webstorm / IntelliJ you can write first using placeholder variable names in a single file. One click to rename the variable and all references throughout the app. Drag the file to a different folder and imports are fixed everywhere. Want to move a single function to a different file? One click…

If you're doing a lot of that, sure. But not all of us are, or are constrained by compatibility requirements.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#69
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.

I haven't found Jetbrains IDEs to be slow in my personal experience. Assuming a beefy CPU and enough memory, I've found Intellij to be really zippy - instantly switching between files in large projects, no lag during text editing etc.

I can understand why you have this idea though - most other IDEs I have used have been noticeably sluggish compared to more lightweight editors even on high end hardware.

Re: My thoughts about editors in 2020

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Searching can be handled with ag or ripgrep and used anywhere with any text files, with only a terminal.

I've never used ripgrep... Does it do offline indexing? because that's what my IDE does and why search is instant. Tools that actually have to go and search everything will never be as fast. Obviously that sort of functionality can exist outside an IDE... And functionality can be added via plugins to any editor...
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