6 ms·
For me as a daily Emacs user this sounds like another "editor war" rant. I neither find Emacs hard to customize nor do I think it has any substantial limitation
by jonathanstrange 8y ago
For me as a daily Emacs user this sounds like another "editor war" rant. I neither find Emacs hard to customize nor do I think it has any substantial limitations other than the ones that are based on my own lack of knowledge. It's always fair to compare it to Vim, but I don't think it makes much sense to compare it in general to VS Code or Atom.
One major reason for me to use Emacs and not newer software is that it is not only cross-platform but also gives some confidence that I will be able to use it in twenty years from now on a new platform. The same could be said about Vim. In comparison to these two, newer editors sometimes appear too ephemeral and fragile to me. (Then again, I used to use BBedit on the Mac and just found out that it's still around! What a nice surprise!)
- jhall1468 8y agoBoth Atom and VSCode are multiplatform and can run on any platform emacs can. Hell there's a version of it that runs in-browser. Both have commercial backing and the platform is built ok Chrome. Hard to imagine a world where any of that adds up to ephemeral.
- LanceH 8y agoAny platform? Like the terminal on my server?
- jhall1468 8y agoNo, like your browser since it's a GUI? A terminal isn't a platform.
- PeCaN 8y agoI'd love to use Atom on a little QNX system, can you tell me where I can find the Atom distribution? It's possible to build Emacs on it.
- jhall1468 8y agoThat's my bad, I should expect stupid responses when I make a stupid statement. Major platform where, you know, it makes sense to have. You'd "love" to have Atom on your realtime OS? For what, exactly?
- gilnaa 8y agoI'd bet he'd want to edit text; but I'm no fortune teller.
- jhall1468 8y agoYou'd probably use a text editor in that case. I'd bet most operating systems include one.
- PeCaN 8y agoI need to work on my disruptive startup's decentralized AI blockchain machine learning product using Vue.js from my car's infotainment system. Actually though pre-6.6 QNX had a great GUI and is capable of running on desktops and laptops just fine¹. I rather like it. ¹ Hardware support is not great but way better than you might be expecting. Either way, it runs fine in VMWare and VirtualBox. I'm currently trying to acquire some parts to build a PowerPC laptop for QNX.
- rusk 8y agoSame. I used to swear by Intellij but they just kept on changing things, and even breaking things on me the odd time. This latest emacs upgrade has been seamless and hasn't required any cognitive overhead to transition. That said, I'll always be back to IntelliJ for heavy edits. There's nothing better for Java. I find for less structured languages the less-structured approach engendered by emacs is an advantage.
- saulrh 8y agoemacs has a couple of packages working to implement the editor side of the language server protocol, so it's probably not long until it's at rough feature parity for structured editing of languages with rich semantics.
- oblio 8y agoFor some perspective: BBEdit - launched in 1992 (26 years ago), still around. Notepad++ - launched in 2003 (15 years ago), still around. Textmate - launched in 2004 (14 years ago), still around. Sublime - launched in 2008 (10 years ago), still around. Almost all the mainstream editors since 1995 at least are around. They have been marginalized, but they're generally around. Especially cross platform editors and even more so Open Source ones have great survival characteristics. That's why both Atom and VS Code seem like solid long term bets.
- mseebach 8y agoTo see why this isn't necessarily the case, add to your list all the text editors launched between 1992 and 2008 that are no longer around ("being around" defined as being able to install and run on whatever OS you're using on your main computer with no special effort).
- mr_overalls 8y agoExactly. The post above yours is simply an illustration of survivorship bias.
- oblio 8y agoI'd be interested to hear about former mainstream editors from that time that are gone. Especially cross platform and Open Source ones :)
- fredsanford 8y agoBrief, Multiedit, Codewright, Semware, Slickedit and Epsilon used to keep the lights on at many programming/tech magazines. You don't hear much about them anymore... Clark Maurer still updates Slickedit at least annually though.
- oblio 8y agoYou made me curious as I'd never heard of any of these editors... (except for Slickedit, I think) A bit of digging around: Brief seems completely dead, was killed off by Borland. Multiedit seems operational: http://multieditsoftware.com/ http://multieditsoftware.com/ It doesn't seem to active, but you can still buy the product. Semware is still technically "alive": http://www.semware.com/ http://www.semware.com/ It was last updated in 2005, so there's that :) Slickedit: is definitely operational: https://www.slickedit.com/ https://www.slickedit.com/ I have no idea why you're counting it as dead? Epsilon: seems operational http://www.lugaru.com/ http://www.lugaru.com/ They even had a release in 2018. To also clarify my previous statement, in the history of software, there's pre-mass PC and pre-internet. In my opinion the 2 periods are not comparable. Anything which was launched before 1995-9 or so is way more likely to have died. The mass PC and the internet have offered even commercial products much higher resilience. Now, if a tool for developers reaches the mainstream, it super likely to stick. I find very often that arguments by Emacs and Vim users come from a time before 1999 or so, when companies were super volatile. Look at this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/08/01/rick-chapman-is-in-search-of-stupidity/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/08/01/rick-chapman-is-in...
- BooneJS 8y agoEmacs is compared to vim because both can be run in a terminal on a remote machine, not because it’s the JS-editor-of-the-month. There’s a fairly decent chance I’d switch away from vim if I ever had a job where I could edit code locally.
- oblio 8y agoI see this occasionally. Why can't you edit locally?
- BooneJS 8y agoSometimes it’s policy (no source code on laptops), but mostly it’s because my line of work uses the verilog language and the tool suites require “very stable” (read: archaic) versions of Linux.
- oblio 8y agoDamn, that's a shame, I hope that the pay is good at least :)
- hprotagonist 8y agodo you know about TRAMP? https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode
- vq 8y agoCan you use ssh/scp? Emacs is able to use that to edit files remotely. I often use it when I work with small Arm Linux boards. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Remote-Files.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Re...
- xfer 8y agosshfs is a thing. If i had to use remote machines only, i would use tramp; not run an emacs instance on a remote machine. I haven't had good experience running editors inside tmux.
- 8y ago
- Mononokay 8y agoVS Code and Atom are practically guaranteed to run until the end of time at this point. The sole benefit of web apps is that they're more likely to remain functional than native ones.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]