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Late career Unix engineers refuse to concede on decades long debate
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wrycoder 5y ago“I’m too busy cleaning up after these old farts to give a damn about which text editor I use. Hell, all of their services are moving to three micro instances in AWS at the end of the year anyway.”
- volfied 5y agoIs there a The Onion equivalent for programming and engineering related news?
- klyrs 5y agoApparently, we don't need it...
- quantified 5y agoSome subreddit somewhere. [https://thedailywtf.com https://thedailywtf.com] is good for reality-based humor.
- pipeline_peak 5y agoN-Gate is! They directly make fun of “Hacker” “News” and its brogrammer circle jerk bike shedding. Heads up though, their stuff up to 1-2 years ago is a lot funnier than now. Also they’re a lot less active. http://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoThat's because HN had a lot more satire-worthy content few years ago. I feel people started moderating themselves mainly in response to ngate Like, "Rust evangelism strike force" was coined by ngate and we don't see them that often anymore
- Annatar 5y ago[dead]
- sidpatil 5y ago> Like, "Rust evangelism strike force" was coined by ngate and we don't see them that often anymore Is that because of self-moderation or is it because Rust isn't at the peak of its hype cycle anymore?
- pipeline_peak 5y agoI don’t check figures, but Rust hype feels ever lasting….
- LennyHenrysNuts 5y agoI'm one of them.
- bee_rider 5y agoI don't really know why anyone in their right mind would use emacs, but it isn't like it costs anything but a minuscule amount of disk space to keep it around, so who cares? The war is over now we must all ally against VSCode and any other web-browser-as-a-text-editor monstrosities. Except nano users, they don't get a vote.
- webmobdev 5y agoIsn't VSCode built with electron?
- astoriafloyd 5y agoYeah exactly, a web-browser-as-a-text-editor.
- wrycoder 5y agoIn the olden times, it was Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
- mech422 5y agoMy fav was "Emacs Makes A Computer Slow" ... though, that was 20 years ago :-D
- tramtrist 5y agoStill figuring out if this is satire or not... A lot of people still have strong feelings here
- pevey 5y agoI’m pretty sure it is satire with a strong helping of “much truth in jest.”
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoI wasn't sure either. I clicked on the disclaimer link to find out.
- mplabelspace 5y agoRest assured, no unix engineers were harmed in the making of this new post.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoAt first I thought this was about the recent "controversy" on the postfix users mailing list, wherein several times in ~6 months people have asked that the site properly support HTTPS and been shouted down by angry people who say that it's pointless; Wietse and Viktor have refused to say anything more than "our hosting agreement doesn't include HTTPS."
- pevey 5y agoThey are both wrong. Pico/nano.
- nsxwolf 5y agoNo, ed. The standard editor.
- nikau 5y ago?
- tpoacher 5y agoWtf, just punch holes in the cards like the rest of us, billy!
- mplabelspace 5y agoThis human gets it
- netizen-936824 5y agoNano gang rep Not that I actually use it for anything substantial, I just prefer it over vi for quick edits
- astoriafloyd 5y agoAcme FTW!
- nix23 5y agoYes YES!!!
- 4WIW 5y agoRead the whole article, still not sure which one should I use. Can someone enlighten me?
- newusertoday 5y agoyes it's emacs ;-)
- smackeyacky 5y agoEmacs, in Vi mode :-) http://www.billharlan.com/emacs/#:~:text=You%20can%20switch%20between%20vi,with%20any%20number%20of%20repeat%20 http://www.billharlan.com/emacs/#:~:text=You%20can%20switch%....
- _8j50 5y agoUse Nano.
- hobomatic 5y agokakoune
- pas 5y agoWell, since busybox containers have neither I just use cat - > target.sh copy-paste the thing then Ctrl-D. Much cleaner, simpler experience compared to VSCode's SFTP plugin, that - for some reason - always logs an error, even though the upload completed successfully...
- RealStickman_ 5y agoYou could use emacs to connect over ssh. ;)
- gnubison 5y agoBusybox vi is definitely a thing … but even then it probably has ed.
- mplabelspace 5y ago
- oceanghost 5y agoI cut my teeth on Linux in the early 90s... I know this is satire, but the devotion to vi an emacs when things like Sublime Text exist is ridiculous.
- kjeetgill 5y agoYou can pry vim from my cold dead hands. But truthfully, I can't imagine life without vim. How do you read or edit files on remote servers? Or in a docker container locally? How do you just open all recently edited files without vim -p $(git diff HEAD^ --name-only) ? I'd feel so lost without it.
- AlchemistCamp 5y agoI used Sublime from 2012-2014, then briefly Atom, then Jetbrains, then ended up with Vim for the past four years. It's sped me up a bit for sure, but even more importantly is that it's done wonders for my RSI. With the amount of time I've spent using non-ergonomic laptops over the past 12 years, even typing was pretty painful for a while. After minimizing my mouse usage, getting a Kenisis keyboard and my wrists starting getting better. The ergonomic keyboard helped, but VIM definitely has also. Whatever editor I work with, I configure it so I can use VIM bindings.
- kdtsh 5y agoSublime Text is a commercial text editor. I used it during university, but it honestly just feels weird now to consider daily-driving a non-free (as in freedom and free beer, honesty mainly free beer) text editor when there are so many free alternatives out there. I don’t understand why someone would use Sublime Text instead of VSCode today. I got into Emacs because it seemed like a neat thing to do. I don’t proselytise people to Emacs because learning it is a time-sink and the return you get is only realised if you really embrace a fully text-based interface, which can be hard and sometimes feels pointless. That being said, it is my IDE (lsp-mode) for all languages and my git client (magit), and while I have not been able to make effective use of most other features in Emacs (org-mode, email clients, eww, etc.), these two things alone pay for themselves in spades. The learning curve is real, but the idea that you have to spend ages configuring your text editor is only true if you don’t use one of the many excellent distributions out there like Spacemacs, Doom, and Prelude. I also use Vi keybindings (evil) because Vim is ubiquitous, and all the things people said about modal editing being a boon to productivity and helping you prevent RSI (which Emacs keybindings did not help with at all). I think Nano is awesome, but I never made it my go-to because it didn’t come installed by default on the old RHEL VMs I managed, while an old version it Vim did - go figure.
- BrandoElFollito 5y agoI find it normal that people are attached to something like an editor, or a font. I started to administer unix machines early 90's. Vi had always been a shitshow for me and I loved the editor joe. Then pico. Then nano. Then graphical ones. Today vscode. I am amazed how people use vi and the speed they get from it (honestly). When I ssh or docker exec, I am happy to know i, a and :q! in vi. What I do not like, though, is someone telling me that my editor is wrong and theirs is the right one. Someone showing me their editor/font/ whatever useful software is a godsend. I learned so much from these people.
- flykespice 5y agoI started to use vim because I needed a CLI editor that is powerful and bloat-free. Emacs seemed too much feature creep to me. I'm not a fanatic, I'm skeptical about the tools I use and I'm feeling like moving to an ide like Vscode because they seem being much more productive to working with large codebases(has built-in source code navigation tools, etc).
- throw0101a 5y ago> I started to use vim because I needed a CLI editor that is powerful and bloat-free. Emacs seemed too much feature creep to me. My pet peeve is that by default on most Linux distros nowadays, when I type in "vi" I get the Crayola® colours of Vim. If I wanted Vim I would have typed in "vim". I'm editing a .conf file, not hacking the kernel source code. (Also I have no need for all the colours of the default ls(1): a simple 'ls -F' will do for showing the characters "/@*" for their type. No need for the Technicolor®.)
- dekhn 5y agoBill, is that you? I used to work for a guy who got really angry when we switched to linux and ls did color. I had to show him how to unalias ls.
- throw0101a 5y agoSeems that some people are get angry in the other direction as I'm getting downvotes.
- tpoacher 5y agoWhat the hell is wrong with clickbait titles on HN lately?
- taylodl 5y agoI for one can't wait for these people to retire. Seriously, the world moved on from this "debate" several decades ago (well, most of the world has - there are still people who are fiercely passionate about this non-issue). I happen to use emacs. Do you happen to use and prefer vi? Great! I don't care. You do you. We can even pair program together! It's not like I'm going to die when you launch vi!
- dreamsbythelake 5y agoBut have you noticed how he got CFO attention with single replica? Such talent should be used in sales :-), or at least for the training of sales teams. "No Time To Retire" ...
- ilovecaching 5y agoAs long as you're not shelling out money for JB bloatware use what you like.
- PeterWhittaker 5y agoIf I had to, if I absolutely had to, I could stop using vim. But the more I use, the more I can do with it. But do I care what someone else uses? Nope. Not a whit. Not even a little bit. A colleague with whom I work very closely is VScode guy. He can make it do it impressive things. We chide each other from time to time. But neither of us cares. What we care about is the code we write using these tools. We both have our favourites in the garage as well, but those tools are irrelevant by the time we get to the rocks and camber. What matters is the work, not how the work was done.