7 ms·

>Vim and Emacs are still superior if you want to put the time >in, TBH, not every developer is willing to become a power user or interested to learn an IDE ins

• coliveira 11y ago
  That is fine, I think it is great that IDEs exist for easy editing and debugging. But power users will always exist in the programming community. These people will naturally use Vim and Emacs because they support the customization levels needed for complex programming workflows.
  • mwfunk 11y ago
    In my experience novices have an easier time learning programming with an intuitive IDE, but experienced users use whatever makes the most sense given the task at hand, which in many cases might also be an IDE. They're just different tools with different pros and cons, and each of those pros and cons are weighted differently depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Very few programming workflows are so complicated that it is simply not possible to do something without first creating your own highly customized environment within Emacs. However, very, very many programmers do have a lot more fun screwing around with customizing their work environment (editor, window manager, shell, etc.) than using that environment to get actual work done (myself included). Which is not to say that Vim and Emacs aren't awesome tools, I just wouldn't generalize anything about anyone based on the tools they use.
    • aldanor 11y ago
      One thing that is not immediately obvious about vim (or evil Emacs) is the gamification part. Before I switched to Spacemacs myself, I used to think -- why do those vim guys torture themselves using an old deprecated tool. Now I actually find it fun to edit text or code and think of how much everyone else is missing :)
• coryrc 11y ago
  Why spend a few hours over the course of 60000+ working hours to learn how to use more effective tools?
  • Goronmon 11y ago
    You're making the assumption that vim/emacs are more effective tools.
    • krisdol 11y ago
      You're arguing that stating that water is wet is an assumption
      • imtringued 11y ago
        If it's so obvious then it should be easy to back up your claim with data.
        • typon 11y ago
          I highly doubt its even possible to obtain such data. The best you will have is anecdotal claims. For example, do productive programmers tend to use Vim or is it the other way around? It's hard to find the causality.
    • taylodl 11y ago
      The best possible programming environment is comprised of emacs coupled with a "lispy" language such as Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket or Clojure and the REPL to go along with it. Nerdvana.
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        And the somewhat sad thing is that this is only a shadow of what was once possible on Lisp Machines... In some areas, we really did make a big step back over the last three decades.
  • 11y ago
• weaksauce 11y ago
  Vim is a language to edit text and you can use that language in a lot of development environments. if you code all day it's worth learning. verbs like ci" (change inside ") which deletes inside the current double quotes and leaves you in insert mode are pretty easy to get used to. dd deletes a line and puts it into the yank register so you can paste it somewhere. u undos an action. using a plugin with visual studio is pretty king to get the best of the IDE and the most common vim functionality. Classic SO answer on why vi: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118/1772636 http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118/1772636 edit: here is another classic why vi answer that is a bit different http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html
• dubdubbub 11y ago
  > I can safely say that Microsoft tools are Developers friendly most of the time You only think that because you have used it and became accustomed to vstudio. As someone who has used vstudio, eclipse, atom, intellij, vim, emacs - I can safely say that vim and emacs are far more 'developer-friendly' than the others.
  • ngrilly 11y ago
    Why?
    • Ace17 11y ago
      Because the low-level modularity of Vim and Emacs gives you more control, by letting you choose the combination of tools you use ; instead of tying together the language(s), the compiler, the tag/completion engine, the build/project system, the debugger, the profiler, like many IDEs do. The sole concept of IDEs specialized for one language makes me cringe.
      • JoBrad 11y ago
        > The sole concept of IDEs specialized for one language makes me cringe. Can you explain this a bit? I don't see that Sublime, VS Code, Atom, etc. were made for one language, at all. As a little background, I've used vim for a while, then switched to Sublime Text, and am just trying VS Code. I find Sublime/VS Code/Atom to be far easier to customize than vim.
        • Skinney 11y ago
          I'm pretty sure he is referring to Eclipse, Visual Studio and the like.
        • Ace17 11y ago
          This is not what I said: I consider Atom and Sublime Text to be advanced general-purpose text editors, not IDEs. I was indeed referring to Eclipse and Visual Studio. From what I observed around me, for some reason, people don't use these to edit: - shellscripts/perlscripts/batchfiles. - Files written in a in-house domain-specific language. - Configuration files. - Makefiles and project files: vcxproj, sln ... Actually, I observed that these kind of IDEs discouraged people doing the above things, giving them the impression that it's not "real development" (I suspect that this is, in part, where the bizarre term "scripting language" comes from, but this is another debate).
• Un1corn 11y ago
  It makes sense that if you program a lot that you will learn how to save time in the long run. It took me a day or two comfortable enough to be efficient in it, at least as I was with Atom. After the first few days, you will just learn new tricks while you are programming. You will see that after you learn how to use Vim you won't want to use anything else to edit text, you emails, browser and word processing will be in Vim.