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What is more innovative, a light IDE with plugins written in JavaScript and backed by a big company or a small Lisp machine disguised as a text editor where eve

What is more innovative, a light IDE with plugins written in JavaScript and backed by a big company or a small Lisp machine disguised as a text editor where every key is bound to a Lisp command and every changes and extensions in its code or extensions can be tested interactively in a "live coding" environment, where the user is empowered to modify and extend what he wants?

edanm 5y ago
I don't care about innovative in that sense, I care about features - what can my text editor actually do, and how well does it fit with how I use my computer in other cases. E.g. the simplest example - intellisense and inline linting, debugging etc. are all really awesome features. I've set them up once or twice with vim and emacs, but it's always a pain, always takes a long time, breaks often, etc. With VSCode, I click a button and I have everything I need for Python installed in a second. That's the difference between actually using a feature, and not. When I install a new computer, I will actually use e.g. Python linting with VSCode, but not with vim, cause I won't bother to set it up.
- Kototama 5y ago
  For some of the IDE functionalities Emacs can be behind. Like debugging, or jumping to function definition (it depends of the languages and extensions). For some other functionalities it is far more advance, like support for Git (magit) or very fast navigation inside the project (projectile, Helm etc), mass renaming things (grep, ag and wgrep) etc. In general IDEs are very bad at text manipulation and good at structural manipulation, whereas Emacs is very good at text manipulation and okay at structural manipulation (or excellent for it but only for Lisp). The set of functionalities in an IDE is fixed, whereas Emacs is extensible, by it users.
  - edanm 5y ago
    So I think you're actually wrong on some of these. And again, I say this as a massive fan of vim and emacs. Support for git is awesome in vscode. You install a plug-in and get great support for various commands. Another plugin and you can have every line annotated with a git blame (a faded text at the end of the line), as well as having a git blame annotation at the top of each function. These were game changers for me. Though full disclosure, I haven't used magit much - but that's part of the problem. The learning curve on the vscode stuff was zero. Project navigation is dead simple in vscode, I don't think emacs has any advantage. As for text manipulation, as a vim snob, I'll just point out that text editing is really only good with Vim. Luckily vscode has a vim mode that's decent. Not perfect at all, but decent. As for extensibility - all the above are plugins. It is extensible.

edanm 5y ago

I don't care about innovative in that sense, I care about features - what can my text editor actually do, and how well does it fit with how I use my computer in other cases. E.g. the simplest example - intellisense and inline linting, debugging etc. are all really awesome features. I've set them up once or twice with vim and emacs, but it's always a pain, always takes a long time, breaks often, etc. With VSCode, I click a button and I have everything I need for Python installed in a second. That's the difference between actually using a feature, and not. When I install a new computer, I will actually use e.g. Python linting with VSCode, but not with vim, cause I won't bother to set it up.

Kototama 5y ago
For some of the IDE functionalities Emacs can be behind. Like debugging, or jumping to function definition (it depends of the languages and extensions). For some other functionalities it is far more advance, like support for Git (magit) or very fast navigation inside the project (projectile, Helm etc), mass renaming things (grep, ag and wgrep) etc. In general IDEs are very bad at text manipulation and good at structural manipulation, whereas Emacs is very good at text manipulation and okay at structural manipulation (or excellent for it but only for Lisp). The set of functionalities in an IDE is fixed, whereas Emacs is extensible, by it users.
- edanm 5y ago
  So I think you're actually wrong on some of these. And again, I say this as a massive fan of vim and emacs. Support for git is awesome in vscode. You install a plug-in and get great support for various commands. Another plugin and you can have every line annotated with a git blame (a faded text at the end of the line), as well as having a git blame annotation at the top of each function. These were game changers for me. Though full disclosure, I haven't used magit much - but that's part of the problem. The learning curve on the vscode stuff was zero. Project navigation is dead simple in vscode, I don't think emacs has any advantage. As for text manipulation, as a vim snob, I'll just point out that text editing is really only good with Vim. Luckily vscode has a vim mode that's decent. Not perfect at all, but decent. As for extensibility - all the above are plugins. It is extensible.