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I'm a fan of vim, BBEdit, and Visual Studio Code, but "less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor. While I'm using VSCode a lot more these

I'm a fan of vim, BBEdit, and Visual Studio Code, but "less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor. While I'm using VSCode a lot more these days, I still like BBEdit a lot. It's a Mac-native programmer's text editor that manages to remain performant on large files. I think part of the problem is that in order to make a good programmer's text editor, you need a large community of people who're able and willing to make good plugins for it, and any text editor with a userbase smaller than "half of all linux nerds" isn't going to have enough engineer hours put into all its per-language tooling. Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers and whatnot, but the granddaddy of all Mac text editors can't attract that much attention. Plus, I get a _lot_ of mileage out of multiple cursors. Way more than I'd have expected ten years ago.

josteink 7y ago
> Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers Not to nitpick an otherwise good argument, but the whole point behind LSP and language servers are that they are completely editor-agnostic. A language server which enables great functionality in VSCode should be able to provide the same for other editors too.
- jolux 7y ago
  I know what you mean but VSCode tends to have the benchmark front-end implementation for any given language server in my experience. Not how it should be, of course.
jolux 7y ago
>"less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor. Fair, I think what I meant is that Visual Studio Code has more IDE features than my emacs does (I know it's possible to have more but things seem less stable when I start using LSPs and such), but BBEdit has even fewer than emacs.

josteink 7y ago

> Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers Not to nitpick an otherwise good argument, but the whole point behind LSP and language servers are that they are completely editor-agnostic. A language server which enables great functionality in VSCode should be able to provide the same for other editors too.

jolux 7y ago
I know what you mean but VSCode tends to have the benchmark front-end implementation for any given language server in my experience. Not how it should be, of course.

jolux 7y ago

>"less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor. Fair, I think what I meant is that Visual Studio Code has more IDE features than my emacs does (I know it's possible to have more but things seem less stable when I start using LSPs and such), but BBEdit has even fewer than emacs.