4 ms·

Because it has a friendly interface, while Vim and Emacs have all these "weird" keybinds and whatnot. These are people switching from e.g. SublimeText to Atom.

by anon4 11y ago

Because it has a friendly interface, while Vim and Emacs have all these "weird" keybinds and whatnot. These are people switching from e.g. SublimeText to Atom. I am not trying to harp on Vim or Emacs, I myself am a Vim user and use it for C++ code.

zeveb 11y ago
> Because it has a friendly interface, while Vim and Emacs have all these "weird" keybinds and whatnot. vim and emacs are friendly and welcoming to people who already know them; new users in 2016 have some weird expectations due to growing up using insufficiently-powerful UIs, which means that they have quite a learning curve when picking up a powerful UI.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > vim and emacs are friendly and welcoming to people who already know them; new users in 2016 have some weird expectations due to growing up using insufficiently-powerful UIs, which means that they have quite a learning curve when picking up a powerful UI. Having first used both vi and emacs (and other text-mode - and even line-mode -- editors), though only casually then, I disagree; vi and emacs are, like almost anything, friendly and welcoming to people who have become deeply familiar with them, but they simply aren't as accessible as tools that benefit from the advances in the intervening years in making UIs easy to use for people that haven't invested huge amounts of time in familiarity. This is really a different issue than UI power (though if vim and emacs didn't have both powerful UIs and substantially bodies of users with long investments, they wouldn't stick around in the face of their disadvantages in terms of onramp.) Older users just didn't, when they were new, have alternatives with a simpler learning curve. So, there really was no trade off for the power vi and emacs offered (less powerful alternatives of the time were still just as inaccessible), where now there is.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    > So, there really was no trade off for the power vi and emacs offered (less powerful alternatives of the time were still just as inaccessible), where now there is. There's simply nothing out there as good as emacs. Nothing. Eclipse, IntelliJ, Atom, SublimeText, all those pale in comparison. vim has its positive points (it's an excellent way for a human to edit line-oriented text), but ultimately it too falls down in the general case. emacs is simply the best way for a human being to use a computer to edit data. There still isn't an alternative to vim and emacs. I kinda wish there were, but there ain't. Someday I'd like to use a modern emacs-like editor, implemented in Common Lisp (or a successor language), but right now emacs is the pinnacle of editor evolution.
    - cyphar 11y ago
      > vim has its positive points (it's an excellent way for a human to edit line-oriented text), but ultimately it too falls down in the general case I think the only thing that Vim doesn't do that it should is actually use a proper language for scripting. Emacs has elisp, but Vim has VimScript which is a horribly stunted langauge. Aside from that, I much prefer vim to emacs. Just because everything is mode-based, and the keybindings don't require 10 hands to do anything.
      - zeveb 11y ago
        Check out spacemacs: the modes of vim, and the extensibility of emacs. Not really by cup of tea, but it sounds pretty cool.

by anon4 11y ago

zeveb 11y ago

> Because it has a friendly interface, while Vim and Emacs have all these "weird" keybinds and whatnot. vim and emacs are friendly and welcoming to people who already know them; new users in 2016 have some weird expectations due to growing up using insufficiently-powerful UIs, which means that they have quite a learning curve when picking up a powerful UI.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> vim and emacs are friendly and welcoming to people who already know them; new users in 2016 have some weird expectations due to growing up using insufficiently-powerful UIs, which means that they have quite a learning curve when picking up a powerful UI. Having first used both vi and emacs (and other text-mode - and even line-mode -- editors), though only casually then, I disagree; vi and emacs are, like almost anything, friendly and welcoming to people who have become deeply familiar with them, but they simply aren't as accessible as tools that benefit from the advances in the intervening years in making UIs easy to use for people that haven't invested huge amounts of time in familiarity. This is really a different issue than UI power (though if vim and emacs didn't have both powerful UIs and substantially bodies of users with long investments, they wouldn't stick around in the face of their disadvantages in terms of onramp.) Older users just didn't, when they were new, have alternatives with a simpler learning curve. So, there really was no trade off for the power vi and emacs offered (less powerful alternatives of the time were still just as inaccessible), where now there is.
- zeveb 11y ago
  > So, there really was no trade off for the power vi and emacs offered (less powerful alternatives of the time were still just as inaccessible), where now there is. There's simply nothing out there as good as emacs. Nothing. Eclipse, IntelliJ, Atom, SublimeText, all those pale in comparison. vim has its positive points (it's an excellent way for a human to edit line-oriented text), but ultimately it too falls down in the general case. emacs is simply the best way for a human being to use a computer to edit data. There still isn't an alternative to vim and emacs. I kinda wish there were, but there ain't. Someday I'd like to use a modern emacs-like editor, implemented in Common Lisp (or a successor language), but right now emacs is the pinnacle of editor evolution.
  - cyphar 11y ago
    > vim has its positive points (it's an excellent way for a human to edit line-oriented text), but ultimately it too falls down in the general case I think the only thing that Vim doesn't do that it should is actually use a proper language for scripting. Emacs has elisp, but Vim has VimScript which is a horribly stunted langauge. Aside from that, I much prefer vim to emacs. Just because everything is mode-based, and the keybindings don't require 10 hands to do anything.
    - zeveb 11y ago
      Check out spacemacs: the modes of vim, and the extensibility of emacs. Not really by cup of tea, but it sounds pretty cool.