16 ms·

There's an argument here struggling to get out. As an emacs user, I agree with some of the ideas he is attempting to express, but then it just sort of gets buri

by hvs 15y ago

There's an argument here struggling to get out. As an emacs user, I agree with some of the ideas he is attempting to express, but then it just sort of gets buried in "I don't like emacs or vim." and "too much customization bothers me." Maybe a better discussion than: "why are all these developers still using vim and emacs" is: "why haven't we come up with development tools in the past 30 years that are compelling enough to draw people away from vim and emacs?"

mrspeaker 15y ago
Agreed. I've been using emacs a lot lately and the thing I like most about it is that I feel like I'm a hacker in the 80s. I think the flight to old text editors is caused because of the problems with modern ones. At some point you just think "SURELY this problem has been solved before". But it seems like it hasn't.
- adw 15y ago
  I think it's a bit of an indictment of the industry, actually. We're not that good at making tools to think with for people less skilled than ourselves, and that's the most important thing we can be doing. Here's an example. I'm not the most technical guy round here – I mean, I write code but it's not magic – but even taking all weekend, I couldn't get either emacs or vim to do reasonable Python code completion. This shouldn't be hard.
  - hvs 15y ago
    Which, as an emacs user, I completely agree with. Certain things in emacs are much more difficult to get working than they should be. Emacs sucks, but other editors just suck more (I'm not talking about you vim). To be fair, though, emacs was designed in a completely different development world, and yet it can still compete against modern development tools. That is more of an indictment of modern tools than it is of emacs.
  - swah 15y ago
    And that reminds me of a post by Steve Yegge saying that the language interpreter/compiler should make it easy for Emacs to offer completion. Otherwise is very hard to implement a great completion...
jerrya 15y ago
Yeah, I've never been able to stand eclipse. I get a big monitor and a fast computer, and eclipse ends up showing me code in a 20 row by 40 column window and jeez, I could see more code and faster using emacs in the first crts. But the article, titled "On The Flight to Old Text Editors" told me little about why people are moving back to vim or emacs. What is the value that longtime eclipse or textmate users are seeing in emacs or vim? Speed? Keyboards? What problems of modern text editors does emacs and vim solve? Mostly what I get from the article is that the flight to old school editors is a hipster thing. Oh yeah, gotta use the old school editors because we're hipsters. Eclipse is a sellout man. Textmate is for Lady Gaga. I edit it old school vim and emacs.
- hvs 15y ago
  Which is funny, because I remember a few years ago (circa 2007) when Rails was just starting to get big and Textmate was the hipster editor. All of which is idiotic, because anyone who chooses an editor based on image is most likely a terrible developer. That said, I think Textmate is a very good editor and one of the few capable contenders in the editor "wars". The biggest downside is that it is Mac-only.
  - mattgreenrocks 15y ago
    Finally, a sane voice. The notion of an editor 'war' is laughable. I'm sure in five years or so someone will innovate in the graphical editor arena and the pendulum will swing back. And, lo and behold, all of the bloggers and Tweeters will gush about their "10x" productivity increases. I never seem to get those sorts of massive productivity gains, as the hard/slow parts of development take place in my mind.
  - surfingdino 15y ago
    I switch between Vim and Textmate. One is better for some jobs, the other is unbeatable at others. There's still ed(1), of course...
jballanc 15y ago
I think this is a case of the classic fallacy of evolution. Which is more evolved: E. coli? or Humans? Before you answer, consider that E. coli has been living successfully in various ecological niches literally all across the globe for a couple billion years. In other words: just because something is newer doesn't mean it is better, especially when we're talking about a complex system like life...or text editors.
- hvs 15y ago
  But computers really are better than 30 years ago. The fact that we haven't come up with a better text editor is actually surprising. I don't think that emacs is the best that we are capable of.
  - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
    Modern vim is quite a lot more convenient than the original vi; I agree that there's no revolution, but there definitely is progression.
    - jballanc 15y ago
      This. The point of the evolutionary fallacy is that when evolving, creating new forms is not better (necessarily) than improving the existing forms. E. coli today are probably nothing like E. coli 2 billion years ago, but they have been continually improving in their own niche while other organisms have gone off trying to find new niches. Similarly, emacs and vim of today are nothing like emacs and vim of even 10 years ago, but instead of creating new devices they continually improve on a proven model.

by hvs 15y ago

mrspeaker 15y ago

Agreed. I've been using emacs a lot lately and the thing I like most about it is that I feel like I'm a hacker in the 80s. I think the flight to old text editors is caused because of the problems with modern ones. At some point you just think "SURELY this problem has been solved before". But it seems like it hasn't.

adw 15y ago
I think it's a bit of an indictment of the industry, actually. We're not that good at making tools to think with for people less skilled than ourselves, and that's the most important thing we can be doing. Here's an example. I'm not the most technical guy round here – I mean, I write code but it's not magic – but even taking all weekend, I couldn't get either emacs or vim to do reasonable Python code completion. This shouldn't be hard.
- hvs 15y ago
  Which, as an emacs user, I completely agree with. Certain things in emacs are much more difficult to get working than they should be. Emacs sucks, but other editors just suck more (I'm not talking about you vim). To be fair, though, emacs was designed in a completely different development world, and yet it can still compete against modern development tools. That is more of an indictment of modern tools than it is of emacs.
- swah 15y ago
  And that reminds me of a post by Steve Yegge saying that the language interpreter/compiler should make it easy for Emacs to offer completion. Otherwise is very hard to implement a great completion...

jerrya 15y ago

Yeah, I've never been able to stand eclipse. I get a big monitor and a fast computer, and eclipse ends up showing me code in a 20 row by 40 column window and jeez, I could see more code and faster using emacs in the first crts. But the article, titled "On The Flight to Old Text Editors" told me little about why people are moving back to vim or emacs. What is the value that longtime eclipse or textmate users are seeing in emacs or vim? Speed? Keyboards? What problems of modern text editors does emacs and vim solve? Mostly what I get from the article is that the flight to old school editors is a hipster thing. Oh yeah, gotta use the old school editors because we're hipsters. Eclipse is a sellout man. Textmate is for Lady Gaga. I edit it old school vim and emacs.

hvs 15y ago
Which is funny, because I remember a few years ago (circa 2007) when Rails was just starting to get big and Textmate was the hipster editor. All of which is idiotic, because anyone who chooses an editor based on image is most likely a terrible developer. That said, I think Textmate is a very good editor and one of the few capable contenders in the editor "wars". The biggest downside is that it is Mac-only.
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  Finally, a sane voice. The notion of an editor 'war' is laughable. I'm sure in five years or so someone will innovate in the graphical editor arena and the pendulum will swing back. And, lo and behold, all of the bloggers and Tweeters will gush about their "10x" productivity increases. I never seem to get those sorts of massive productivity gains, as the hard/slow parts of development take place in my mind.
- surfingdino 15y ago
  I switch between Vim and Textmate. One is better for some jobs, the other is unbeatable at others. There's still ed(1), of course...

jballanc 15y ago

I think this is a case of the classic fallacy of evolution. Which is more evolved: E. coli? or Humans? Before you answer, consider that E. coli has been living successfully in various ecological niches literally all across the globe for a couple billion years. In other words: just because something is newer doesn't mean it is better, especially when we're talking about a complex system like life...or text editors.

hvs 15y ago
But computers really are better than 30 years ago. The fact that we haven't come up with a better text editor is actually surprising. I don't think that emacs is the best that we are capable of.
- JoachimSchipper 15y ago
  Modern vim is quite a lot more convenient than the original vi; I agree that there's no revolution, but there definitely is progression.
  - jballanc 15y ago
    This. The point of the evolutionary fallacy is that when evolving, creating new forms is not better (necessarily) than improving the existing forms. E. coli today are probably nothing like E. coli 2 billion years ago, but they have been continually improving in their own niche while other organisms have gone off trying to find new niches. Similarly, emacs and vim of today are nothing like emacs and vim of even 10 years ago, but instead of creating new devices they continually improve on a proven model.