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I think Sublime is a great editor. I enjoy a lot of the nice UI based workflows Sublime provides - but always felt that mastering VIM / emacs would provide me

by gapo 9y ago

I think Sublime is a great editor. I enjoy a lot of the nice UI based workflows Sublime provides - but always felt that mastering VIM / emacs would provide me a far better pay out. Does any body else agree ?

ctw 9y ago
Why not both? Sublime (and pretty much every other popular editor I've used) has a "vim mode" (Sublime calls it vintage mode). Sublime's is built in and available right in out of the box, you just need to enable it. I've been using this setup for years. It's the best of both worlds, you get all of the plug-ins, UI, and commands from Sublime while still getting to use vim's commands when just plain editing text. There's no reason I would ever go back to just one or the other.
tmerr 9y ago
There is a neovim plugin for sublime if you want to benefit from both fancy hotkeys and the minimap / other IDE-ish niceities
zapperdapper 9y ago
I used to use graphical editors. I used PFE if anyone remembers that and then PSPad. PFE and PSPad were windows only which turned out to be an issue. I then switched to JEdit, but found that a number of plugins had issues and connecting to get a plugin just didn't work on many occasions. About ten years ago I got a job that required me to edit multiple languages on multiple platforms and I was using about three different editors: Oxygen XML, Eclipse, VS, Python Charm and I just thought this is getting ridiculous. I switched to Emacs because it is cross-platform, fast, and you can edit any kind of file in it. I never looked back. I have edited about a dozen programming languages in it, and used it for markdown, and DocBook and DITA XML editing. Today I am still happily using it. On my latest gig I had to edit TeX - no problem in Emacs. I learn new tricks in it all the time. I have a colour scheme that works really well. Having built in ansi-term and being able to do M-! and then run a shell command save a lot of time in the workflow. There are thousands of features and tweaks you can do. The incremental forward and back search is lightning fast. I use C-r a lot in Bash too. On the whole I'm very pleased with my switch to Emacs. By the way I usually only use the text-only version of Emacs (emacs-nox on Linux). I do keep a copy of AquaMacs installed on my Mac too, but work mostly on the command line. I did actually try Sublime a few years back and have a licence, but I found myself just firing up Emacs on the command line and C-x C-f to fast load a file more often than not. I would say, yes, go for Vim or Emacs, but it depends really what you need from an editor.
sleepychu 9y ago
I have sublime installed for double clicking on text files now and then but I doubt I'll upgrade (I never really found it good enough to be an IDE and for plain text I can't beat VIM) One of the things that I love about VIM is that because I use very few plugins I can edit text just as efficiently on any remote machine without complicated plugin installation. I need to install VIM style movement in whatever IDE I use (IntelliJ these days) because otherwise I find moving around the text painfully slow.
Koshkin 9y ago
Sublime, vim and emacs are three different animals. It does pay to know the basics of the latter two, especially if you expect to have to edit files from the console and/or find yourself using a random UNIX environment (which most likely will not have Sublime installed on it).
criddell 9y ago
I disagree. Maybe you might be marginally better off, but if you enjoy Sublime more, that matters. If you are going for mastery level, that implies you would also learn Sublime's programming model inside and out. If you get to that level of expertise, you are probably going to be more efficient than most when it comes to editing text. If you are going to be using one of those editors a lot anyway (because you will be ssh'ing into a Linux machine or rely on org-mode, for example), then perhaps that would shift the landscape.
chimprich 9y ago
I haven't used Sublime much but I get the impression I'm far faster in Emacs than work colleagues etc. are in Sublime or the latest flavour of IDE. That is after at least a decade and a half of learning and configuring Emacs to my preferences though. At least part of that efficiency (apart from Emacs being awesome) is that I've been able to keep getting better at using my editor rather than having to change tools every so often as less configurable editors get overtaken by ones with new features. Emacs is pretty deep (I keep discovering new things) and configurable in the extreme. I think it's very likely that it will last for decades yet - any killer innovation that another editor comes up with is likely to be quickly copied into Emacs.
- chimprich 9y ago
  Downvoted by a vi fan?

by gapo 9y ago

ctw 9y ago

Why not both? Sublime (and pretty much every other popular editor I've used) has a "vim mode" (Sublime calls it vintage mode). Sublime's is built in and available right in out of the box, you just need to enable it. I've been using this setup for years. It's the best of both worlds, you get all of the plug-ins, UI, and commands from Sublime while still getting to use vim's commands when just plain editing text. There's no reason I would ever go back to just one or the other.

tmerr 9y ago

There is a neovim plugin for sublime if you want to benefit from both fancy hotkeys and the minimap / other IDE-ish niceities

zapperdapper 9y ago

I used to use graphical editors. I used PFE if anyone remembers that and then PSPad. PFE and PSPad were windows only which turned out to be an issue. I then switched to JEdit, but found that a number of plugins had issues and connecting to get a plugin just didn't work on many occasions. About ten years ago I got a job that required me to edit multiple languages on multiple platforms and I was using about three different editors: Oxygen XML, Eclipse, VS, Python Charm and I just thought this is getting ridiculous. I switched to Emacs because it is cross-platform, fast, and you can edit any kind of file in it. I never looked back. I have edited about a dozen programming languages in it, and used it for markdown, and DocBook and DITA XML editing. Today I am still happily using it. On my latest gig I had to edit TeX - no problem in Emacs. I learn new tricks in it all the time. I have a colour scheme that works really well. Having built in ansi-term and being able to do M-! and then run a shell command save a lot of time in the workflow. There are thousands of features and tweaks you can do. The incremental forward and back search is lightning fast. I use C-r a lot in Bash too. On the whole I'm very pleased with my switch to Emacs. By the way I usually only use the text-only version of Emacs (emacs-nox on Linux). I do keep a copy of AquaMacs installed on my Mac too, but work mostly on the command line. I did actually try Sublime a few years back and have a licence, but I found myself just firing up Emacs on the command line and C-x C-f to fast load a file more often than not. I would say, yes, go for Vim or Emacs, but it depends really what you need from an editor.

sleepychu 9y ago

I have sublime installed for double clicking on text files now and then but I doubt I'll upgrade (I never really found it good enough to be an IDE and for plain text I can't beat VIM) One of the things that I love about VIM is that because I use very few plugins I can edit text just as efficiently on any remote machine without complicated plugin installation. I need to install VIM style movement in whatever IDE I use (IntelliJ these days) because otherwise I find moving around the text painfully slow.

Koshkin 9y ago

Sublime, vim and emacs are three different animals. It does pay to know the basics of the latter two, especially if you expect to have to edit files from the console and/or find yourself using a random UNIX environment (which most likely will not have Sublime installed on it).

criddell 9y ago

I disagree. Maybe you might be marginally better off, but if you enjoy Sublime more, that matters. If you are going for mastery level, that implies you would also learn Sublime's programming model inside and out. If you get to that level of expertise, you are probably going to be more efficient than most when it comes to editing text. If you are going to be using one of those editors a lot anyway (because you will be ssh'ing into a Linux machine or rely on org-mode, for example), then perhaps that would shift the landscape.

chimprich 9y ago

I haven't used Sublime much but I get the impression I'm far faster in Emacs than work colleagues etc. are in Sublime or the latest flavour of IDE. That is after at least a decade and a half of learning and configuring Emacs to my preferences though. At least part of that efficiency (apart from Emacs being awesome) is that I've been able to keep getting better at using my editor rather than having to change tools every so often as less configurable editors get overtaken by ones with new features. Emacs is pretty deep (I keep discovering new things) and configurable in the extreme. I think it's very likely that it will last for decades yet - any killer innovation that another editor comes up with is likely to be quickly copied into Emacs.

chimprich 9y ago
Downvoted by a vi fan?