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My Text Editor Journey: Vim, Spacemacs, Atom and Sublime Text

62 points by kot-behemoth 10y ago

petantik 10y ago
I do agree that Spacemacs, although it's a fairly full featured environment that mimics Vim's modal editing, it's true power cannot be fully exploited unless you know Emacs. There are just too many edge cases with the integrations that can make the experience painful. I mostly stick with Vim now since I can easily work through any issues I do encounter with the plugins, and there's no extra layers to worry about.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  Agreed, my big problem with Spacemacs was that it isn't quite Emacs, and it isn't quite Vim, and there aren't many guides just for Spacemacs.
- mschaef 10y ago
  > it's true power cannot be fully exploited unless you know Emacs. Very true. I've used Emacs almost exclusively for 20 years, and what I've found is what you've just said: the key is to use Emacs on its own terms. Otherwise you're fighting too many deeply ingrained behaviors, etc. (The corollary to this is that the reverse is true also - Emacs keybindings for other editors tend to be unsatisfying. They bring the surface, but not the essence of Emacs to some other tool.)
mundanevoice 10y ago
I understand the points you made for Sublime. It gives all most of functionality out of the box without having to remember shortcuts or key bindings. However, your criticism of Vim felt weak to me. Your pain point sounds mostly like a misconfiguration on your part. I have been using Vim for almost 8 years and have used heavily configured to minimal setup. One thing I learned is the issues is always with bad configuration. > my tab key was bound to tons of different things like autocomplete, snippet expansion, indentation, moving between snippet fields and inserting the literal tab character. Clearly, you shouldn't have used tab to do all the things, it is bound to create confusion, if you use tab for everything. Mouse support is first class in Gvim/Macvim.
- faizmokhtar 10y ago
  I agree. I find that using someone else or a ready made .vimrc tend to make it a lot more harder to learn vim. You have to build it slowly based on your own preferences. Otherwise you won't fully utilise it.
metasean 10y ago
The mobile experience of reading this article is horrific. I did enjoy the little bit I was able to read before the lilliputian font drove me away, but drive me away it did!
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Browser? I read it on FF on android and found it ok.
- Veen 10y ago
  Text is a little small on first load, but tap to zoom takes care of that. Although I read almost everything in Reader Mode on Safari anyway.
kaishiro 10y ago
I find articles like this interesting, mainly because I went through a similar transition (IDE => Sublime => vim). However, my story stopped at vim. For this particular article, I think what strikes me as odd is: > use[ing] the keyboard is slower for some selection tasks like selecting a range of text far from the cursor than the mouse is This is...precisely the opposite of my experience. I find navigation and selection to be the most powerful aspects of vim. I never felt like I "got" vim until I understood this, in fact. I constantly questioned if the investment of time was worth it. That being said, if you don't grok this I could see how it would be defeating. You eventually reach a point where you forget the mouse is even an option though. My only other comment is in regard to his mention of issues with tabs. I'm curious what we were doing so differently, because that's never once been a problem for me, even in early days (however I could see how it would be super annoying). I'm of the mind that it doesn't matter what you use as long as you're being productive, but it's also neat to see what path other people walk down.
- neals 10y ago
  I use vim from time to time, when hacking stuff on my server. I often hear people say it's the best editor. Could you tell me; don't you miss a mouse? Or a scrollwheel? Or alt-tabbing? Do you use a project panel wher you can see your files? Do you browse that with your keyboard? I ask because I always struggle in vim.
  - oblio 10y ago
    I've been using Vim for a long time. I'm a sort of Vim heretic, I'd say. In that I'm mostly touch typing but I don't do the whole "fingers on the home row" or even GASP I don't navigate using hjkl. I've played too many games using the arrow keys or awsd to switch to some sort of weird in-line configuration of that. Anyway: 1. Mouse - you can use your mouse with Vim. set mouse=a vmap <C-c> "+y vmap <C-x> "+x vmap <C-v> "+gP There you go. Mouse actions + Ctrl-V Ctrl-C/X/V for easy copy-paste. 2. Scrollwheel - you can enable the scroll wheel, I can't test right now but I'm pretty sure you can use it. I move around more by Page Up/Page Down (another Vim heresy!) or by searching (a ton more common). 3. You can Alt-Tab using Vim. Just use Gvim. Or did you mean switching tabs with Ctrl-Tab? There you go: map <C-Tab> <Esc>:tabnext<CR> map <C-S-Tab> <Esc>:tabprevious<CR> 4. There's quite a few plugins for that. NerdTree, for example. Anyway, don't feel forced to use Vim. I use it because it's cross platform, free and I'm used to it. But don't drink the KoolAid. It's not some magical weapon. Especially if your mental model doesn't match its model. For example in my case it matches only partially (see the whole arrow keys, copy-paste, mouse usage, etc.). But I still use it because I like the modal editing and to be honest, I think that for me command mode/ex mode is what keeps me using it. :s, :g, :tabnew & co. are too darn useful.
reitanqild 10y ago
I wrote this post because I often find myself justifying my use of Sublime Text to Vim and Emacs users. They often look down on Sublime users as people who haven’t put in the effort to learn a real power user’s text editor. They’re confused when they learn that I have tried Vim and Emacs extensively and still choose to use what they see as a basic newbie editor. I hope this post explains why Sublime is an excellent choice for a highly customizable power user’s text editor. My opinion as well although I am not as experienced as the author.
robbiet480 10y ago
Anyone got more examples of awesome Sublime plugins using the new tooltips feature?
bostand 10y ago
Why don't people ever give native emacs a try? No evil-mode, no super-bloat spacemacs, just barebone emacs with maybe one or two plugins??
- bitexploder 10y ago
  It is fine. The one extension I have really come to love is Helm. It makes buffer management great. And navigating files becomes nicer than dired. Along with that it is mostly about good modes.
- quanticle 10y ago
  Why don't people ever give native emacs a try? Because some of us would still like to be programming in 20 years' time rather than being crippled by carpal tunnel ;) I included a smiley, but I'm only half jesting. I tried to use native emacs for a while, but even after remapping caps-lock to ctrl, I was getting weird twinges in my wrist from all the odd angles I was having to go to in order to hit ctrl and meta. I switched back to vim, and the twinges stopped. I didn't know about evil mode or spacemacs then, otherwise I might have tried to stick with emacs.
- afghanPower 10y ago
  Tried it. Very uncomfortable navigation. Installed a couple of plugins (evil is one of them) and Emacs mostly do the same stuff as my nvim right now, except for being superior for Clojure development.
  - bostand 10y ago
    You may disagree, but IMO use of evil mode normally indicates a former vim user is trying really hard to not use emacs the emacs way.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  The emacs that I installed in vanilla Slackware back in '95 seemed plenty super-bloated to me. That's why I learned vi. It took me a long time to even consider that new-fangled 'vim' thing.
edanm 10y ago
Interesting. I find myself in a similar situation, except that I'm still using vim since I have too many cool things set up there that I simply can't do without. As I often say, IMO vim is the best text editor in terms of actually editing text, bar none. Unfortunately, all the million surrounding tasks that you need to do, e.g. opening and switching between files, searching, etc, are terrible in stock vim. I've taken the path of installing tons of plugins to make vim work better, but it's still not as smooth as something like Sublime. I check Sublime once a year or so to see if the vim mode there is "good enough" yet, and it invariably isn't :( Btw, my transition was IDEs (and Slickedit at some point) -> Emacs -> back to IDEs -> Sublime Text 1 (for which I wrote a few plugins) -> vim.
raverbashing 10y ago
"I think the underlying reason is that everything in Emacs, and especially Spacemacs, is a hack" Correct. One of the reasons I don't go the Emacs/Spacemacs way
- grabcocque 10y ago
  This is hacker news. If you look down on hacks, you may be in the wrong place. Yes, Spacemacs is a pile of hacks on top of emacs which is a pile of hacks on top of elisp which is a pile of hacks on top of a terminal emulator which is... Does it matter if they're hacks? Or does it matter that they're good hacks?
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Hacking is important. But refactoring and cleaning up is important after a while Not to mention the political issues w/ Emacs
vr46 10y ago
Sublime is an excellent editor and anyone who looks down on anyone else for their choice is not doing so because they are a Vim/Emacs user, it is because they are being an idiot. I feel that Textmate really showed everyone how good a GUI editor could be - we are going back approximately 12 years, and BBEdit, Alpha, Smultron, Hydra/SubEthaEdit were the main contenders at the time. I concur about Spacemacs, it promises much but things quickly go awry for me whenever I've tried it. Confusion in Vim is easily engineered out in a config or two, and one of the main benefits of learning Vim or its bindings is that it's very likely to still be with me just before I breathe my last. Text Editors are investments in a fast moving technology industry and Vim/Emacs are a global reserve currency.
- dvcrn 10y ago
  My main reason why, despite me loving Sublime Text, am not using it is because during their silent phase a ton of plugin developers jumped ship (me included). Now crucial plugins like Vintageous (vim emulation) are dead and not being maintained anymore. Then there are things that are still not possible, despite it being an issue for a long time. Stuff like relative line numbers and gutter plugins overriding each other constantly. Currently I am still using VIM because it does exactly what I want it to do. I know what a keystroke does and why and am one line change away to optimize bad behaviour. But despite that, I have to say that vscode is currently probably the champ out there. You almost don't feel the electron overhead at all. It's blazing fast, intuitive and snappy with an active plugin ecosystem. I'm hoping to get a little bit of free time soon to port some of my vimrc to vscode.
  - vr46 10y ago
    I had forgotten about the "quiet time" of Sublime. It felt like a repeat of the Textmate downtime. I had also forgotten about VSCode. I like having a GUI editor handy in my dock for quickly opening something drag-n-drop style. And most of the editors I can see in there right now are a little laggy (I'm looking at you Atom, and you, Brackets) so VSCode is now downloading for a quick test.
    - 10y ago
grabcocque 10y ago
I ended up on Spacemacs (for making emacs discoverable and tractable to mortals) and VS Code (for its thoughtful and clean design). I was amazed I ended up falling in love with an editor from Microsoft of all people, but they seem to have learned all the right lessons from Atom.
- StreakyCobra 10y ago
  Exactly this. I tried a lot of text editors, and I ended up with Spacemacs. The "everything is text" concept of emacs in conjunction with vim's modal editing is the most powerful interface that I've used. But after a while you start noticing that the the fact that emacs is 100% hackable is also its biggest problem: everything is possible, and tons of plugins exists. Because of this, a lot of interactions between plugins start to go wrong. The nice plugin that shows you a bar at 80 characters is working well… except in HTML files where this is breaking the display/indentation/completion. Or this other plugin that fails in a specific language, or that other one that doesn't work for diff editing. I got tired of always fighting and wasting time with plugins and configurations. So I started to look at other editors. Atom? Too slow. Vim? Not an IDE. Sublime? Not open-source. And then I found VSCode, refreshing. I start to love it (and feel bad about this, because… Microsoft, you know…). My problem now is that Spacemacs has put the barrier of keybinding efficiency so high that none of the other editors can compete. Whenever I try another editor, like VSCode, I miss the efficiency of Spacemacs, and especially Magit (one of the most awesome pieces of software I have used). In Spacemacs I do absolutely everything without mouse, with VSCode I have to use the mouse, so it's less efficient (though this has been widely debated recently [1]). I'm stuck. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13847301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13847301
thewhitetulip 10y ago
I tried out many text editors and settled down on Vim, the reason being every other text editor eats way too much of my battery, I'd tolerate a few less advanced features, as long as my laptop runs for 8hrs on a single charge. Plus, did anyone else notice that the file icon for Rust code is of Visual studio code, in the second photo.
- rawland 10y ago
  +1 The battery lifetime argument made me stick to vim, too. Oddly enough, I recently tend to use VSCode when being attached to AC. It really seems that Microsoft gets this more and more right. They even added the Minimap after listening to their users. Let me repeat: Microsoft. Listening. To. Users! Still can't believe it. However, my main argument for VSCode are side by side previews: Eases writing, while pleasing the eye. Vim simply isn't made for this.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    I love VSCode, have been using it before it was 1.0 version, but sadly, it is always "using significant energy" in Mac, same is the case with every. other. editor. except vim!! Even I can't believe that MS is running a famous FOSS project and they actually listen to users, times are great :-) Still, vim = awesome.
drej 10y ago
Stories like these amuse me, mostly because it reminds me a bit of my own journey. Years and years ago, I remember tuning vim into oblivion, spending more time in .vimrc than in my code (but I had time, Gentoo was busy compiling... something). I learned a great deal and I still use vim whenever I'm ssh'ed some place. But. I started valuing my time and I realised that tuning a text editor is not worthwhile. I don't mean it in a bad way - go nuts if you feel like it, I just chose not to do so. I'm a happy user of Sublime Text now, have been for years. It's such a relief. I know none of its features and it feels great. I enjoy the speed, mouse support, clear text, its remembering of all unsaved files and other user friendly features.
- erikb 10y ago
  How long have you used vim? I had a time of like two months where I spent a lot of time in .vimrc. But it happens less and less often. Now I'm at about one single one line change in two months.
taylodl 10y ago
"I wrote this post because I often find myself justifying my use of Sublime Text to Vim and Emacs users. They often look down on Sublime users as people who haven’t put in the effort to learn a real power user’s text editor." This is the real problem. You don't owe anyone any explanation for the text editor you use. Personally, I'm an emacs man. I know lots of people who prefer vim. Some prefer Sublime Text. Some even prefer TextPad Pro. That's fine. That's their business and at the end of the day what I care about is their code, not the editor they're using to hack on it. If people get frustrated with their editor and ask what I'm using, then I'll tell them about emacs. But I'll also tell them emacs isn't for everyone. To wit, in the case the author mentioned of finding other files in his project I'll either use dired or open an emacs shell window and use find. This is a great workflow for me. Others would find it abhorrent. To each their own - and that is the point!
moron4hire 10y ago
I routinely throw away whatever text editor I'm using and pick up a new one. Probably once a year. On occasion, the replacement text editor is one I've wrote (usually at that time). I find it helps me write code that other people can understand and use. IDK why the text editor has such a big impact. Maybe the frustrations of certain actions in certain editors discourages those actions and subtly biases the code I write. I've not dug into it too deeply. The one thing I hate is managing plugins and configs. This stems from my other habit of trying a new OS every year, too. The only way to keep a consistent config across all of these states is to just accept the default config as the one, true config. If a feature is good enough to be a plugin, it's good enough to be in the software. I've been very keen to go on another text editor adventure, this time with focus on creating a good experience on mobile devices.
redsummer 10y ago
I tried to learn Emacs, but the time allegedly saved by using it was more than countered by the time fiddling with it to get it working properly. I'd rather have a pencil than a self-assembled typewriter.
joelthelion 10y ago
Don't worry, you'll be back to vim in a few years.
alderz 10y ago
I find no mention in the article to org-mode. It is the reason I am sticking with emacs (well, spacemacs), nothing I have tried comes close. I have been a vim user for many many years and I love its simplicity compared to emacs, but org-mode is truly life-changing.
TurboHaskal 10y ago
Former vi / Emacs user here. You could try Acme. It feels great (zen-like, actually) not having to remember a dozen keybindings, not maintaining configurations and simply clicking around and using whatever is on your $PATH.
- RBerenguel 10y ago
  Also, no syntax highligthing, from time to time it is refreshing to move from quite a customised Spacemacs (I moved from raw emacs to Spacemacs to clean up my .emacs file) to something cleaner and leaner. Acme with plan9ports and piping is pretty nice to use and allows for some fancy customizations that feel very natural, mouse-wise.
erikb 10y ago
The goal is not to get feature x into the editor, but solve problem A, and one editor solves that with feature x the other with feature y. If you try to make vim as Sublime like as possible, of course you will fail. But if you really learn vim, you'll see its true power. The same goes the other way around. For instance I hardly miss auto complete and file trees.
- erikb 10y ago
  I have to say though, that I'm not one of these vim users who hate Sublime. I think Sublime, Vim, Emacs and probably also VisualStudio are awesome editors. You should just know one and know it well. That means using it heavily for 2 years +.
k__ 10y ago
My Journey was Notepad++, Eclipse, PHPStorm, Sublime Text, Atom, VSCode. Eclipse really helped me with its Git integration and when PHP got more sophisticated I really appreciated the help the IDE gave me over Notepad++. I switched to PHPStorm because it was way cheaper than VS but had better support than Eclipse and more up to date features that helped with PHP. But it got heavier and heavier and the company I worked for would not buy new dev machines, so one day I switched to Sublime Text, which felt like a speedup by 100x. Also I switched from PHP to JavaScript in that time. PHP had better typing so the IDE could help much more than with JavaScript, so I didn't see much gain in using PHPStorm or WebStorm. Then Atom came out and got updates and new modules faster than Sublime Text and since I was now mainly a JavaScript dev, it just felt right lol. But Atom was also much slower than Sublime and the modules were often low quality. So I tried VSCode, because I read a few good things about it and it really was better. Not as fast as Sublime Text, but faster than Atom and still with bleeding edge modules and updates. It's becoming more and more of a modular IDE, but I think their module system is rather good so I think they can keep up performance wise for a time now. I also tried stuff like Brackets, Vim and Emacs, but they either felt too simple or they had a too steep learning curve for my taste.

62 points by kot-behemoth 10y ago

I do agree that Spacemacs, although it's a fairly full featured environment that mimics Vim's modal editing, it's true power cannot be fully exploited unless you know Emacs. There are just too many edge cases with the integrations that can make the experience painful. I mostly stick with Vim now since I can easily work through any issues I do encounter with the plugins, and there's no extra layers to worry about.

CJefferson 10y ago
Agreed, my big problem with Spacemacs was that it isn't quite Emacs, and it isn't quite Vim, and there aren't many guides just for Spacemacs.
mschaef 10y ago
> it's true power cannot be fully exploited unless you know Emacs. Very true. I've used Emacs almost exclusively for 20 years, and what I've found is what you've just said: the key is to use Emacs on its own terms. Otherwise you're fighting too many deeply ingrained behaviors, etc. (The corollary to this is that the reverse is true also - Emacs keybindings for other editors tend to be unsatisfying. They bring the surface, but not the essence of Emacs to some other tool.)

mundanevoice 10y ago

I understand the points you made for Sublime. It gives all most of functionality out of the box without having to remember shortcuts or key bindings. However, your criticism of Vim felt weak to me. Your pain point sounds mostly like a misconfiguration on your part. I have been using Vim for almost 8 years and have used heavily configured to minimal setup. One thing I learned is the issues is always with bad configuration. > my tab key was bound to tons of different things like autocomplete, snippet expansion, indentation, moving between snippet fields and inserting the literal tab character. Clearly, you shouldn't have used tab to do all the things, it is bound to create confusion, if you use tab for everything. Mouse support is first class in Gvim/Macvim.

faizmokhtar 10y ago
I agree. I find that using someone else or a ready made .vimrc tend to make it a lot more harder to learn vim. You have to build it slowly based on your own preferences. Otherwise you won't fully utilise it.

metasean 10y ago

The mobile experience of reading this article is horrific. I did enjoy the little bit I was able to read before the lilliputian font drove me away, but drive me away it did!

reitanqild 10y ago
Browser? I read it on FF on android and found it ok.
Veen 10y ago
Text is a little small on first load, but tap to zoom takes care of that. Although I read almost everything in Reader Mode on Safari anyway.

kaishiro 10y ago

I find articles like this interesting, mainly because I went through a similar transition (IDE => Sublime => vim). However, my story stopped at vim. For this particular article, I think what strikes me as odd is: > use[ing] the keyboard is slower for some selection tasks like selecting a range of text far from the cursor than the mouse is This is...precisely the opposite of my experience. I find navigation and selection to be the most powerful aspects of vim. I never felt like I "got" vim until I understood this, in fact. I constantly questioned if the investment of time was worth it. That being said, if you don't grok this I could see how it would be defeating. You eventually reach a point where you forget the mouse is even an option though. My only other comment is in regard to his mention of issues with tabs. I'm curious what we were doing so differently, because that's never once been a problem for me, even in early days (however I could see how it would be super annoying). I'm of the mind that it doesn't matter what you use as long as you're being productive, but it's also neat to see what path other people walk down.

neals 10y ago
I use vim from time to time, when hacking stuff on my server. I often hear people say it's the best editor. Could you tell me; don't you miss a mouse? Or a scrollwheel? Or alt-tabbing? Do you use a project panel wher you can see your files? Do you browse that with your keyboard? I ask because I always struggle in vim.
- oblio 10y ago
  I've been using Vim for a long time. I'm a sort of Vim heretic, I'd say. In that I'm mostly touch typing but I don't do the whole "fingers on the home row" or even GASP I don't navigate using hjkl. I've played too many games using the arrow keys or awsd to switch to some sort of weird in-line configuration of that. Anyway: 1. Mouse - you can use your mouse with Vim. set mouse=a vmap <C-c> "+y vmap <C-x> "+x vmap <C-v> "+gP There you go. Mouse actions + Ctrl-V Ctrl-C/X/V for easy copy-paste. 2. Scrollwheel - you can enable the scroll wheel, I can't test right now but I'm pretty sure you can use it. I move around more by Page Up/Page Down (another Vim heresy!) or by searching (a ton more common). 3. You can Alt-Tab using Vim. Just use Gvim. Or did you mean switching tabs with Ctrl-Tab? There you go: map <C-Tab> <Esc>:tabnext<CR> map <C-S-Tab> <Esc>:tabprevious<CR> 4. There's quite a few plugins for that. NerdTree, for example. Anyway, don't feel forced to use Vim. I use it because it's cross platform, free and I'm used to it. But don't drink the KoolAid. It's not some magical weapon. Especially if your mental model doesn't match its model. For example in my case it matches only partially (see the whole arrow keys, copy-paste, mouse usage, etc.). But I still use it because I like the modal editing and to be honest, I think that for me command mode/ex mode is what keeps me using it. :s, :g, :tabnew & co. are too darn useful.

reitanqild 10y ago

I wrote this post because I often find myself justifying my use of Sublime Text to Vim and Emacs users. They often look down on Sublime users as people who haven’t put in the effort to learn a real power user’s text editor. They’re confused when they learn that I have tried Vim and Emacs extensively and still choose to use what they see as a basic newbie editor. I hope this post explains why Sublime is an excellent choice for a highly customizable power user’s text editor. My opinion as well although I am not as experienced as the author.

robbiet480 10y ago

Anyone got more examples of awesome Sublime plugins using the new tooltips feature?

bostand 10y ago

Why don't people ever give native emacs a try? No evil-mode, no super-bloat spacemacs, just barebone emacs with maybe one or two plugins??

bitexploder 10y ago
It is fine. The one extension I have really come to love is Helm. It makes buffer management great. And navigating files becomes nicer than dired. Along with that it is mostly about good modes.
quanticle 10y ago
Why don't people ever give native emacs a try? Because some of us would still like to be programming in 20 years' time rather than being crippled by carpal tunnel ;) I included a smiley, but I'm only half jesting. I tried to use native emacs for a while, but even after remapping caps-lock to ctrl, I was getting weird twinges in my wrist from all the odd angles I was having to go to in order to hit ctrl and meta. I switched back to vim, and the twinges stopped. I didn't know about evil mode or spacemacs then, otherwise I might have tried to stick with emacs.
afghanPower 10y ago
Tried it. Very uncomfortable navigation. Installed a couple of plugins (evil is one of them) and Emacs mostly do the same stuff as my nvim right now, except for being superior for Clojure development.
- bostand 10y ago
  You may disagree, but IMO use of evil mode normally indicates a former vim user is trying really hard to not use emacs the emacs way.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
The emacs that I installed in vanilla Slackware back in '95 seemed plenty super-bloated to me. That's why I learned vi. It took me a long time to even consider that new-fangled 'vim' thing.

edanm 10y ago

Interesting. I find myself in a similar situation, except that I'm still using vim since I have too many cool things set up there that I simply can't do without. As I often say, IMO vim is the best text editor in terms of actually editing text, bar none. Unfortunately, all the million surrounding tasks that you need to do, e.g. opening and switching between files, searching, etc, are terrible in stock vim. I've taken the path of installing tons of plugins to make vim work better, but it's still not as smooth as something like Sublime. I check Sublime once a year or so to see if the vim mode there is "good enough" yet, and it invariably isn't :( Btw, my transition was IDEs (and Slickedit at some point) -> Emacs -> back to IDEs -> Sublime Text 1 (for which I wrote a few plugins) -> vim.

raverbashing 10y ago

"I think the underlying reason is that everything in Emacs, and especially Spacemacs, is a hack" Correct. One of the reasons I don't go the Emacs/Spacemacs way

grabcocque 10y ago
This is hacker news. If you look down on hacks, you may be in the wrong place. Yes, Spacemacs is a pile of hacks on top of emacs which is a pile of hacks on top of elisp which is a pile of hacks on top of a terminal emulator which is... Does it matter if they're hacks? Or does it matter that they're good hacks?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Hacking is important. But refactoring and cleaning up is important after a while Not to mention the political issues w/ Emacs

vr46 10y ago

Sublime is an excellent editor and anyone who looks down on anyone else for their choice is not doing so because they are a Vim/Emacs user, it is because they are being an idiot. I feel that Textmate really showed everyone how good a GUI editor could be - we are going back approximately 12 years, and BBEdit, Alpha, Smultron, Hydra/SubEthaEdit were the main contenders at the time. I concur about Spacemacs, it promises much but things quickly go awry for me whenever I've tried it. Confusion in Vim is easily engineered out in a config or two, and one of the main benefits of learning Vim or its bindings is that it's very likely to still be with me just before I breathe my last. Text Editors are investments in a fast moving technology industry and Vim/Emacs are a global reserve currency.

dvcrn 10y ago
My main reason why, despite me loving Sublime Text, am not using it is because during their silent phase a ton of plugin developers jumped ship (me included). Now crucial plugins like Vintageous (vim emulation) are dead and not being maintained anymore. Then there are things that are still not possible, despite it being an issue for a long time. Stuff like relative line numbers and gutter plugins overriding each other constantly. Currently I am still using VIM because it does exactly what I want it to do. I know what a keystroke does and why and am one line change away to optimize bad behaviour. But despite that, I have to say that vscode is currently probably the champ out there. You almost don't feel the electron overhead at all. It's blazing fast, intuitive and snappy with an active plugin ecosystem. I'm hoping to get a little bit of free time soon to port some of my vimrc to vscode.
- vr46 10y ago
  I had forgotten about the "quiet time" of Sublime. It felt like a repeat of the Textmate downtime. I had also forgotten about VSCode. I like having a GUI editor handy in my dock for quickly opening something drag-n-drop style. And most of the editors I can see in there right now are a little laggy (I'm looking at you Atom, and you, Brackets) so VSCode is now downloading for a quick test.
  - 10y ago

grabcocque 10y ago

I ended up on Spacemacs (for making emacs discoverable and tractable to mortals) and VS Code (for its thoughtful and clean design). I was amazed I ended up falling in love with an editor from Microsoft of all people, but they seem to have learned all the right lessons from Atom.

StreakyCobra 10y ago
Exactly this. I tried a lot of text editors, and I ended up with Spacemacs. The "everything is text" concept of emacs in conjunction with vim's modal editing is the most powerful interface that I've used. But after a while you start noticing that the the fact that emacs is 100% hackable is also its biggest problem: everything is possible, and tons of plugins exists. Because of this, a lot of interactions between plugins start to go wrong. The nice plugin that shows you a bar at 80 characters is working well… except in HTML files where this is breaking the display/indentation/completion. Or this other plugin that fails in a specific language, or that other one that doesn't work for diff editing. I got tired of always fighting and wasting time with plugins and configurations. So I started to look at other editors. Atom? Too slow. Vim? Not an IDE. Sublime? Not open-source. And then I found VSCode, refreshing. I start to love it (and feel bad about this, because… Microsoft, you know…). My problem now is that Spacemacs has put the barrier of keybinding efficiency so high that none of the other editors can compete. Whenever I try another editor, like VSCode, I miss the efficiency of Spacemacs, and especially Magit (one of the most awesome pieces of software I have used). In Spacemacs I do absolutely everything without mouse, with VSCode I have to use the mouse, so it's less efficient (though this has been widely debated recently [1]). I'm stuck. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13847301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13847301

thewhitetulip 10y ago

I tried out many text editors and settled down on Vim, the reason being every other text editor eats way too much of my battery, I'd tolerate a few less advanced features, as long as my laptop runs for 8hrs on a single charge. Plus, did anyone else notice that the file icon for Rust code is of Visual studio code, in the second photo.

rawland 10y ago
+1 The battery lifetime argument made me stick to vim, too. Oddly enough, I recently tend to use VSCode when being attached to AC. It really seems that Microsoft gets this more and more right. They even added the Minimap after listening to their users. Let me repeat: Microsoft. Listening. To. Users! Still can't believe it. However, my main argument for VSCode are side by side previews: Eases writing, while pleasing the eye. Vim simply isn't made for this.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  I love VSCode, have been using it before it was 1.0 version, but sadly, it is always "using significant energy" in Mac, same is the case with every. other. editor. except vim!! Even I can't believe that MS is running a famous FOSS project and they actually listen to users, times are great :-) Still, vim = awesome.

drej 10y ago

Stories like these amuse me, mostly because it reminds me a bit of my own journey. Years and years ago, I remember tuning vim into oblivion, spending more time in .vimrc than in my code (but I had time, Gentoo was busy compiling... something). I learned a great deal and I still use vim whenever I'm ssh'ed some place. But. I started valuing my time and I realised that tuning a text editor is not worthwhile. I don't mean it in a bad way - go nuts if you feel like it, I just chose not to do so. I'm a happy user of Sublime Text now, have been for years. It's such a relief. I know none of its features and it feels great. I enjoy the speed, mouse support, clear text, its remembering of all unsaved files and other user friendly features.

erikb 10y ago
How long have you used vim? I had a time of like two months where I spent a lot of time in .vimrc. But it happens less and less often. Now I'm at about one single one line change in two months.

taylodl 10y ago

"I wrote this post because I often find myself justifying my use of Sublime Text to Vim and Emacs users. They often look down on Sublime users as people who haven’t put in the effort to learn a real power user’s text editor." This is the real problem. You don't owe anyone any explanation for the text editor you use. Personally, I'm an emacs man. I know lots of people who prefer vim. Some prefer Sublime Text. Some even prefer TextPad Pro. That's fine. That's their business and at the end of the day what I care about is their code, not the editor they're using to hack on it. If people get frustrated with their editor and ask what I'm using, then I'll tell them about emacs. But I'll also tell them emacs isn't for everyone. To wit, in the case the author mentioned of finding other files in his project I'll either use dired or open an emacs shell window and use find. This is a great workflow for me. Others would find it abhorrent. To each their own - and that is the point!

moron4hire 10y ago

I routinely throw away whatever text editor I'm using and pick up a new one. Probably once a year. On occasion, the replacement text editor is one I've wrote (usually at that time). I find it helps me write code that other people can understand and use. IDK why the text editor has such a big impact. Maybe the frustrations of certain actions in certain editors discourages those actions and subtly biases the code I write. I've not dug into it too deeply. The one thing I hate is managing plugins and configs. This stems from my other habit of trying a new OS every year, too. The only way to keep a consistent config across all of these states is to just accept the default config as the one, true config. If a feature is good enough to be a plugin, it's good enough to be in the software. I've been very keen to go on another text editor adventure, this time with focus on creating a good experience on mobile devices.

redsummer 10y ago

I tried to learn Emacs, but the time allegedly saved by using it was more than countered by the time fiddling with it to get it working properly. I'd rather have a pencil than a self-assembled typewriter.

joelthelion 10y ago

Don't worry, you'll be back to vim in a few years.

alderz 10y ago

I find no mention in the article to org-mode. It is the reason I am sticking with emacs (well, spacemacs), nothing I have tried comes close. I have been a vim user for many many years and I love its simplicity compared to emacs, but org-mode is truly life-changing.

TurboHaskal 10y ago

Former vi / Emacs user here. You could try Acme. It feels great (zen-like, actually) not having to remember a dozen keybindings, not maintaining configurations and simply clicking around and using whatever is on your $PATH.

RBerenguel 10y ago
Also, no syntax highligthing, from time to time it is refreshing to move from quite a customised Spacemacs (I moved from raw emacs to Spacemacs to clean up my .emacs file) to something cleaner and leaner. Acme with plan9ports and piping is pretty nice to use and allows for some fancy customizations that feel very natural, mouse-wise.

erikb 10y ago

The goal is not to get feature x into the editor, but solve problem A, and one editor solves that with feature x the other with feature y. If you try to make vim as Sublime like as possible, of course you will fail. But if you really learn vim, you'll see its true power. The same goes the other way around. For instance I hardly miss auto complete and file trees.

erikb 10y ago
I have to say though, that I'm not one of these vim users who hate Sublime. I think Sublime, Vim, Emacs and probably also VisualStudio are awesome editors. You should just know one and know it well. That means using it heavily for 2 years +.

k__ 10y ago

My Journey was Notepad++, Eclipse, PHPStorm, Sublime Text, Atom, VSCode. Eclipse really helped me with its Git integration and when PHP got more sophisticated I really appreciated the help the IDE gave me over Notepad++. I switched to PHPStorm because it was way cheaper than VS but had better support than Eclipse and more up to date features that helped with PHP. But it got heavier and heavier and the company I worked for would not buy new dev machines, so one day I switched to Sublime Text, which felt like a speedup by 100x. Also I switched from PHP to JavaScript in that time. PHP had better typing so the IDE could help much more than with JavaScript, so I didn't see much gain in using PHPStorm or WebStorm. Then Atom came out and got updates and new modules faster than Sublime Text and since I was now mainly a JavaScript dev, it just felt right lol. But Atom was also much slower than Sublime and the modules were often low quality. So I tried VSCode, because I read a few good things about it and it really was better. Not as fast as Sublime Text, but faster than Atom and still with bleeding edge modules and updates. It's becoming more and more of a modular IDE, but I think their module system is rather good so I think they can keep up performance wise for a time now. I also tried stuff like Brackets, Vim and Emacs, but they either felt too simple or they had a too steep learning curve for my taste.