4 ms·

To add to all these good points, also the fact that vi/emacs isn't going away on the whim of some company that comes and goes. So the effort to learn these (and

by jjav 6y ago

To add to all these good points, also the fact that vi/emacs isn't going away on the whim of some company that comes and goes. So the effort to learn these (and any long-lived open source components) is amortized over my lifetime, not the short lifetime of a commercial tool. Whenever I change projects or jobs I know emacs will be there as efficient as always so I can concentrate on being productive instead of on learning yet another ephemeral IDE.

azemetre 6y ago
I haven't even been a developer long, but I remember everyone was using Eclipse then Sublime then Atom then Brackets then VSCode. This was all within a span of 3 years. I've been using vim for most of my career but will use other tools when pairing or working with others, the only thing I regret is not learning the intricacies of vim more. I'm not proficient but every few months I improve more and more, and it's nice to use a tool that has been around for decades and will continue to be around for decades more.
- jnxx 6y ago
  > I remember everyone was using Eclipse then Sublime then Atom then Brackets then VSCode. This was all within a span of 3 years. Yes. The half-life of these things is rather short. And there are few reasons to expect that this will be better with the IDEs which are currenyly touted by one marketing department or another. In the meantime I am using Emacs since over 20 years. I can adapt it to new things (such as magit) when this is useful but it never breaks my flow.
jnxx 6y ago
The most important advantage of Emacs and vi are, these are open systems, which come out of an open culture, not just "open source" but really free software, with no strings attached. Granted, open source is having its successes, so companies are trying to jump onto that bandwagon, but this has mainly the consequence that the strings attached are less visible - like "telemetrics", inacceptable spyware, waste of attention, artificial obstacles to competitor languages / systems, unwarranted and empty hype, and so on. It is important to recognize the tone of that, and to listen to it, and to think about it, because it can warn you before making bad decisions. Also, Emacs has top-notch documentation. While basic commands are not that hard to learn, there is certainly a lot of stuff one can learn, so much that it takes some amount of conscious effort to learn a good fraction of what is relevant to certain tasks. That said, Emacs also makes fantastic use of a undervalued property of the human brain, which is automatic decluttering, forgotting and blending out things which are not in use, like a diligent and friendly housemaid which brings anything which you haven't really used in the last year into the attic ;-) But, jokes aside, exactly like learning the Linux command line well, learning some Emacs is an /excellent/ use of ones time as a programmer, because the half-life time of the knowledge you gather is much much longer than when you just learn the latest IDE. Chances are that your IDE du jour will be mostly forgotten five or six years from now. Chances are high that the basic command-line tools and Emacs commands you learn now will still be useful twenty and thirty years from now.

by jjav 6y ago

azemetre 6y ago

I haven't even been a developer long, but I remember everyone was using Eclipse then Sublime then Atom then Brackets then VSCode. This was all within a span of 3 years. I've been using vim for most of my career but will use other tools when pairing or working with others, the only thing I regret is not learning the intricacies of vim more. I'm not proficient but every few months I improve more and more, and it's nice to use a tool that has been around for decades and will continue to be around for decades more.

jnxx 6y ago
> I remember everyone was using Eclipse then Sublime then Atom then Brackets then VSCode. This was all within a span of 3 years. Yes. The half-life of these things is rather short. And there are few reasons to expect that this will be better with the IDEs which are currenyly touted by one marketing department or another. In the meantime I am using Emacs since over 20 years. I can adapt it to new things (such as magit) when this is useful but it never breaks my flow.

jnxx 6y ago

The most important advantage of Emacs and vi are, these are open systems, which come out of an open culture, not just "open source" but really free software, with no strings attached. Granted, open source is having its successes, so companies are trying to jump onto that bandwagon, but this has mainly the consequence that the strings attached are less visible - like "telemetrics", inacceptable spyware, waste of attention, artificial obstacles to competitor languages / systems, unwarranted and empty hype, and so on. It is important to recognize the tone of that, and to listen to it, and to think about it, because it can warn you before making bad decisions. Also, Emacs has top-notch documentation. While basic commands are not that hard to learn, there is certainly a lot of stuff one can learn, so much that it takes some amount of conscious effort to learn a good fraction of what is relevant to certain tasks. That said, Emacs also makes fantastic use of a undervalued property of the human brain, which is automatic decluttering, forgotting and blending out things which are not in use, like a diligent and friendly housemaid which brings anything which you haven't really used in the last year into the attic ;-) But, jokes aside, exactly like learning the Linux command line well, learning some Emacs is an /excellent/ use of ones time as a programmer, because the half-life time of the knowledge you gather is much much longer than when you just learn the latest IDE. Chances are that your IDE du jour will be mostly forgotten five or six years from now. Chances are high that the basic command-line tools and Emacs commands you learn now will still be useful twenty and thirty years from now.