7 ms·

Those who do not understand Emacs are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. On a more serious note I could never understand why a closed source editor gained any tr

by nukeop 8y ago

Those who do not understand Emacs are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. On a more serious note I could never understand why a closed source editor gained any traction among developers, especially when it lacks many, many features other more mature editors have had for years. Any Sublime users here that could provide their reasons for sticking with it?

sntran 8y ago
I can't say for others, but for me, Sublime was the quickest standalone editor that I can download, run, and open big files really fast. I haven't found the same speed with Atom or VSCode.
- steveeq1 8y ago
  What about vim?
  - h1d 8y ago
    I think it's safe to say vim/emacs are different things than sublime/vs code/IntelliJ. They're ok when there are no alternatives like during SSH session but I've given up customizing after 10 years to make them act like any of the latter ones. Why would I pay for IntelliJ if I could or someone had already made easy to use plugin to just make them act like modern editors?
  - theli0nheart 8y ago
    We all know that's just an unfair comparison.
    - steveeq1 8y ago
      How so?
      - theli0nheart 8y ago
        I mean, find the biggest file you can open with Vim, and then find the biggest file you can open with any other full-fledged editor. I doubt most full-fledged editor will be able to handle a 5GB+ log file, much less perform a search / replace within a reasonable amount of time. Vim just has a lot less going on under the hood by default and is built for this. In short, I guess I'm agreeing with your original post. Vim is just on another level when it comes to performance versus other editors so it's kind of unfair to pit them together.
        accatyyc 8y ago
        It seems like the general opinion that Sublime Text outclasses vim when it comes to opening large files though
        theli0nheart 8y ago
        > It seems like the general opinion that Sublime Text outclasses vim when it comes to opening large files though That comment is _begging_ for a source. Whose general opinion?
        accatyyc 8y ago
        Just looking at the rest of the comments here is one example. And almost every time something about Sublime is posted on HN
zenexer 8y ago
It's fast. Very fast. It can handle very large files without any trouble. I love the features provided by other editors, but when I need performance, I usually stick to Sublime and (neo)vim. vim can't handle large files, though.
- black-tea 8y ago
  Emacs is comparable in speed and memory usage according to this: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/editor-perf/readme.md https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/editor-p... When you consider that emacs is so, so much more it's really quite impressive.
- h1d 8y ago
  I thought vim slows down only because it starts counting the number of lines as shown in the status bar. You could Ctrl-c and file becomes responsive but if you try to save huge file, I once got it truncated to some small part maybe because I quit the editor too early or something. Why do people open very large files with a text editor? If it's a data file, you should grep/head/tail.
  - zenexer 8y ago
    You might be thinking of less.
antihero 8y ago
Because most people are more concerned with what they are making, than spending time pissing about learning how to work out and set up an editor that has 40 year old UX. Things like VSCode and Sublime are clean and accessible, and allow you to start producing and coding quickly and painlessly.
- chimprich 8y ago
  A 40 year old UX is a UX that has had 40 years of refinement iteration applied to it. "Accessible" is a fine goal, everything else being equal, but for something I spend so much time in, I look for maximum potential power in my editor. Compare graphical desktops and the Unix command line.
  - accatyyc 8y ago
    Now now, I use Emacs myself but I wouldn’t call its UX “refined”. It’s loads of stuff piled on top of eachother and many built-in packages to do the same thing (since everything had to be backwards compatible). Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. I’ve never seen a serious emacs user without a heavy customised emacs. And I’ve never seen another emacs user whose config I would be nearly able to use :D I can totally see why people like editors with sane defaults.
    - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
      Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this." I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.
bluedino 8y ago
You don't have to learn it, you can just use it.
lmedinas 8y ago
I was/am an emacs users since > 15y and for ~2 years i left Emacs for sublime text. Main reason, the performance and easy to setup without hacking my .emacsrc everyday. Sure emacs is great and it has 10000x more features than anything else but ask yourself how much of them you really need and how convenient Emacs is at the end of the day ? I asked this myself and i came to the conclusion that i was better off a more recent editor. ST has a similar philosophy like vim and emacs and thats why i choose it. Recently im trying VS Code but the performance is still somehow not fully convincing me.
- fergie 8y ago
  I have tried to make the jump from Emacs to Sublime a couple of times, and more recently Emacs to VScode, but I always end up going back to Emacs. Reading the recent discussions about the need to create commercial entities around open source projects, it occurred to me that Emacs has maybe suffered from not ever being commercialised. It is clearly the best code editor (very few people who master it ever leave it), but its steep learning curve and unreconstructed GUI mean that it remains inaccessible to too many developers. Maybe if a company was created around the product its sales, marketing and documentation would improve, and more people would use it.
azeirah 8y ago
Emacs is great, and Sublime has many drawbacks, as well as some poorly implemented features (like, the macros are basically worthless except for a very select few operations)... But Sublime Text simply outclasses any other Text Editor in the Simplicity + speed vs complexity. Sublime's project goto functionality is simply unbeatable, it is faster than any Vim plugin I've ever used, it starts up faster than Emacs, it requires _no_ configuration to be a great text editor, it's the text-editor embodiment of easy-to-learn, hard-to-master. Emacs is really something you need to actively learn, while you can just pick up Sublime and use it effectively within the first minute of opening it.
warpspin 8y ago
I actually was an Emacs user for many years and then switched to TextMate at first, then to Sublime. The major reason back then was TextMate's and then Sublime's far superior support for editting files containing multiple syntaxes. While mmm-mode for Emacs eased the pain a while back then, it made Emacs slow down to a crawl sometimes and TextMate/then Sublime were also a lot easier to customize with regards to embedded languages without having to write elisp code all the time....
mamcx 8y ago
Because Emacs/Vim are NOT good citizens in any OS. Them live in their own sub-world of the terminal. Simply things like "exit" are weird incarnations on them. Sublime work well across the main OS, live in their world, have no funky weird crazy ways to work (ie: work as expected without retraining for that funky weird crazy sub-world). ---- P.D: I not dislike the terminal, and wish all OS have not 3 competing GUIS (Web,Native, Terminal) but just 2 (so a terminal editor is a native editor, a native paint app is a native terminal app) but that is a pipe dream because the terminal is stuck in the past.

by nukeop 8y ago

sntran 8y ago

I can't say for others, but for me, Sublime was the quickest standalone editor that I can download, run, and open big files really fast. I haven't found the same speed with Atom or VSCode.

steveeq1 8y ago
What about vim?
- h1d 8y ago
  I think it's safe to say vim/emacs are different things than sublime/vs code/IntelliJ. They're ok when there are no alternatives like during SSH session but I've given up customizing after 10 years to make them act like any of the latter ones. Why would I pay for IntelliJ if I could or someone had already made easy to use plugin to just make them act like modern editors?
- theli0nheart 8y ago
  We all know that's just an unfair comparison.
  - steveeq1 8y ago
    How so?
    - theli0nheart 8y ago
      I mean, find the biggest file you can open with Vim, and then find the biggest file you can open with any other full-fledged editor. I doubt most full-fledged editor will be able to handle a 5GB+ log file, much less perform a search / replace within a reasonable amount of time. Vim just has a lot less going on under the hood by default and is built for this. In short, I guess I'm agreeing with your original post. Vim is just on another level when it comes to performance versus other editors so it's kind of unfair to pit them together.
      - accatyyc 8y ago
        It seems like the general opinion that Sublime Text outclasses vim when it comes to opening large files though
        theli0nheart 8y ago
        > It seems like the general opinion that Sublime Text outclasses vim when it comes to opening large files though That comment is _begging_ for a source. Whose general opinion?
        accatyyc 8y ago
        Just looking at the rest of the comments here is one example. And almost every time something about Sublime is posted on HN

zenexer 8y ago

It's fast. Very fast. It can handle very large files without any trouble. I love the features provided by other editors, but when I need performance, I usually stick to Sublime and (neo)vim. vim can't handle large files, though.

black-tea 8y ago
Emacs is comparable in speed and memory usage according to this: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/editor-perf/readme.md https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/editor-p... When you consider that emacs is so, so much more it's really quite impressive.
h1d 8y ago
I thought vim slows down only because it starts counting the number of lines as shown in the status bar. You could Ctrl-c and file becomes responsive but if you try to save huge file, I once got it truncated to some small part maybe because I quit the editor too early or something. Why do people open very large files with a text editor? If it's a data file, you should grep/head/tail.
- zenexer 8y ago
  You might be thinking of less.

antihero 8y ago

Because most people are more concerned with what they are making, than spending time pissing about learning how to work out and set up an editor that has 40 year old UX. Things like VSCode and Sublime are clean and accessible, and allow you to start producing and coding quickly and painlessly.

chimprich 8y ago
A 40 year old UX is a UX that has had 40 years of refinement iteration applied to it. "Accessible" is a fine goal, everything else being equal, but for something I spend so much time in, I look for maximum potential power in my editor. Compare graphical desktops and the Unix command line.
- accatyyc 8y ago
  Now now, I use Emacs myself but I wouldn’t call its UX “refined”. It’s loads of stuff piled on top of eachother and many built-in packages to do the same thing (since everything had to be backwards compatible). Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. I’ve never seen a serious emacs user without a heavy customised emacs. And I’ve never seen another emacs user whose config I would be nearly able to use :D I can totally see why people like editors with sane defaults.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this." I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.

bluedino 8y ago

You don't have to learn it, you can just use it.

lmedinas 8y ago

I was/am an emacs users since > 15y and for ~2 years i left Emacs for sublime text. Main reason, the performance and easy to setup without hacking my .emacsrc everyday. Sure emacs is great and it has 10000x more features than anything else but ask yourself how much of them you really need and how convenient Emacs is at the end of the day ? I asked this myself and i came to the conclusion that i was better off a more recent editor. ST has a similar philosophy like vim and emacs and thats why i choose it. Recently im trying VS Code but the performance is still somehow not fully convincing me.

fergie 8y ago
I have tried to make the jump from Emacs to Sublime a couple of times, and more recently Emacs to VScode, but I always end up going back to Emacs. Reading the recent discussions about the need to create commercial entities around open source projects, it occurred to me that Emacs has maybe suffered from not ever being commercialised. It is clearly the best code editor (very few people who master it ever leave it), but its steep learning curve and unreconstructed GUI mean that it remains inaccessible to too many developers. Maybe if a company was created around the product its sales, marketing and documentation would improve, and more people would use it.

azeirah 8y ago

Emacs is great, and Sublime has many drawbacks, as well as some poorly implemented features (like, the macros are basically worthless except for a very select few operations)... But Sublime Text simply outclasses any other Text Editor in the Simplicity + speed vs complexity. Sublime's project goto functionality is simply unbeatable, it is faster than any Vim plugin I've ever used, it starts up faster than Emacs, it requires _no_ configuration to be a great text editor, it's the text-editor embodiment of easy-to-learn, hard-to-master. Emacs is really something you need to actively learn, while you can just pick up Sublime and use it effectively within the first minute of opening it.

warpspin 8y ago

I actually was an Emacs user for many years and then switched to TextMate at first, then to Sublime. The major reason back then was TextMate's and then Sublime's far superior support for editting files containing multiple syntaxes. While mmm-mode for Emacs eased the pain a while back then, it made Emacs slow down to a crawl sometimes and TextMate/then Sublime were also a lot easier to customize with regards to embedded languages without having to write elisp code all the time....

mamcx 8y ago

Because Emacs/Vim are NOT good citizens in any OS. Them live in their own sub-world of the terminal. Simply things like "exit" are weird incarnations on them. Sublime work well across the main OS, live in their world, have no funky weird crazy ways to work (ie: work as expected without retraining for that funky weird crazy sub-world). ---- P.D: I not dislike the terminal, and wish all OS have not 3 competing GUIS (Web,Native, Terminal) but just 2 (so a terminal editor is a native editor, a native paint app is a native terminal app) but that is a pipe dream because the terminal is stuck in the past.