9 ms·

It amazes me that developers pick closed source Jetbrains and Microsoft spyware for the program they rely on to make a living when Emacs and Vim/Neovim get bett

It amazes me that developers pick closed source Jetbrains and Microsoft spyware for the program they rely on to make a living when Emacs and Vim/Neovim get better by leaps and bounds every year. Emacs has packages that VSCode can only dream of having and with Emacs distributions or really just lsp-mode you can have a full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling. I recently did some digging into the editor usage of noteworthy programmers by going through interviews (usesthis.com was a great resource) and found that 99% of programmers whose names are recognizable are still using Vim/Emacs. Clearly these tools are not holding anyone back from doing great things. Edit: Just yesterday HN was overtly critical of Warp for being a proprietary, closed source, telemetry laden terminal, but they’ll suddenly lose their morals when it comes to text editing over perceived conveniences of an IDE vs. a “text editor” with LSP. The point of Vim/Emacs isn’t just that they are good editors. It is also you voting with your installs and money for free and open source tools. You already reap the benefits of the Linux ecosystem, the least you can do is help out by picking a FOSS editor.

joe_fishfish 5y ago
Good luck writing an iOS app in emacs. (Well, good luck writing one in Xcode, for that matter.)
jonnycomputer 5y ago
With 0 fiddling? not my experience at all. has something changed? I use Emacs for lots of things, but I've long since changed to Pycharm for Python programming. That's been close to 0 fiddling for real. Its been pretty good for JS programming too.
zozbot234 5y ago
Does Emacs ship with LSP support out of the box? They've had a habit in the past of ignoring similar features that were arbitrarily perceived as "proprietary" or not open enough.
- jaster 5y ago
  Don't think out of the box, but https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode works rather well with emacs 28 from my experience. Emacs "distros" such as Spacemacs and Doomemacs both make using it a nearly "out of the box" experience. (not supporting the editor/ide war troll, just trying to contribute some useful info here)
monsieurbanana 5y ago
This kind of comment gives us emacs-users bad reputation. Emacs isn't perfect, dissing people that don't use it is not helping anyone.
lunarplague 5y ago
How do I go about learning emacs when my job requires me to work in a M$ environment, and I have limited free time? I tried learning and felt overwhelmed, and I would like to make strides to make vim or emacs my primary editors for home use, but Visual Studio / Jetbrains just make development incredibly easier to not let the tools prevent me from just writing the code.
- NeutralForest 5y ago
  There are "distributions" such as Doom Emacs or Lunar Vim to get started with a setup from the get-go. Otherwise, the website linked above is a good way to get started, there's also an integrated tutorial in Emacs (C-h t).
Bancakes 5y ago
You miss the point. I want to click 3 buttons and have a usable IDE. Nothing will ever replace visual studio's debugging GUI.
- allarm 5y ago
  Emacs it's not an IDE (out of the box), so it's not your use case, obviously.
  - lunarplague 5y ago
    If OP wants to compare Emacs to Visual Studio and Jetbraines IDE's, then we are going to compare features.
    - allarm 5y ago
      Go ahead comparing apples and oranges, what can I say.
      - Bancakes 5y ago
        OP literally said emacs has extensions IDE's will never have.
        NateEag 5y ago
        I've never seen an IDE with an equivalent to smart-dash-mode: http://malsyned.net/smart-dash.html http://malsyned.net/smart-dash.html
        Bancakes 5y ago
        That's nice, dear. Can you work with .vcxproj files?
        NateEag 5y ago
willbw 5y ago
I'm going to assume this isn't trolling and if it is, you fooled me. I've use Vim professionally, as well as VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs and dabbled in Emacs - the idea that one can replicate what IntelliJ does for Java for instance in any other IDE or text editor is to me, nonsensical. The amount of configuration it would require in vim/neovim/vscode to replicate the refactoring ability of IntelliJ alone would take you longer to setup than it would to code whatever project you're working on. Saying that Vim or Emacs have "zero fiddling" compared to Jetbrains IDEs is a statement that is so vastly different to my experience (doing plenty of fiddling in both) that I would love to hear the backstory of how IDEs hurt you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ilovecaching 5y ago
  Emacs distributions are built for people who want zero fiddling. Fiddling in of itself is not bad. Fiddling is how you learn, and this is a profession that requires constant learning and tinkering. Most of features of a modern IDE are unnecessary or are actively harmful to developing good code. Thinking, taking your time, writing as little code as possible, and organizing a project so it can be easily understood and modified with nothing other than a text editor are positives that an IDE actively inhibits by trying to be helpful.
  - fredoliveira 5y ago
    You're going back and forth. On your first post, you talk about all the things Emacs/Vim have that VSCode/Jetbrains can't possibly have. On this one, you talk about how less features is a good thing. Regardless of where you actually stand on that particular point, you're still comparing apples to oranges. It is also worth noting that I have never had an issue jumping from vim to VSCode (or vice-versa) on the same project. Neither of the two need any extra metadata or configuration. They just work, and I'll choose whichever tool makes sense for whatever I'm doing at the moment. As, frankly, I think everyone should. This fixation over one specific type of tool over another is unnecessary: go with whatever you are most productive with.
mateuszf 5y ago
> It amazes me that developers pick closed source Jetbrains JetBrains Intellij Idea Community Edition is open source
- ilovecaching 5y ago
  Jetbrains products are only partially open source, which makes them non-free and still spyware due to telemetry we can’t see.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    Do you have a reference for "Jetbrains products are ... spyware due to telemetry we can’t see."
    - ziml77 5y ago
      That's the "beauty" of phrasing it like that. It's impossible to prove or disprove.
    - jawilson2 5y ago
      It is packed in a small teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars.
    - seanw444 5y ago
      If the source code of what you are running is not fully available, assume it contains telemetry or data collection.
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
        I assume every stranger that calls me is a scammer. That does NOT mean that everyone who calls me IS a scammer.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    > Jetbrains products are only partially open source You mean the repository at [0] contains code which is not licensed under an open source license? The only license mentioned at the root is Apache 2. [0] https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
bennyp101 5y ago
"you can have a full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling" - that is 100% not a thing that has ever happened to me whenever I go and look at emacs/vim! Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore, and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button ...
- rayiner 5y ago
  Emacs isn’t a modal editor!
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    I refer to it as a chorded editor. Of course there is viper mode.
  - bennyp101 5y ago
    That's true, my bad. I've just only ever used it with evil (I find the chords even harder to remember!)
- youerbt 5y ago
  As long as your input device is optimized for inserting text (and your keyboard certainly is) modal editing is surely something desirable for programming.
- epicide 5y ago
  I agree that neither vim nor emacs are "0 fiddling" [0]. However, > Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore Honestly, I'm not sure it was ever "needed", but that's not really the point IMO. It's hard for me to think about editing text in any way other than how Vim handles it. Part of that is admittedly just familiarity, but I think there's also something to the idea of treating strings as more than just arrays of characters. Once you start thinking about your text and code as nouns of various sizes and granularity [0], losing those feels cumbersome. In order to achieve the latter, you either need modality or a huge number of control hotkeys. Vim takes the former approach while Emacs (and IDEs) takes the latter. So yes, you can achieve the "crowning feature" of Vim (IMO) without modality, but I don't see modality itself as being a pro or a con as much as a design choice. If you don't prefer it, more power to you. > and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button ... This also works the other way. I don't want to have to learn where all the buttons are in $IDE just to move my text about. Thankfully, many IDEs include a Vim mode or plugin for it, but those are never quite the same. Every tool has some level of learning curve. If you want it to be more flexible, powerful, and to get the most out of it, that learning curve is gonna be steeper. That goes for both IDEs with their buttons and Vim with its modal commands. For something that you might use for hours on end every single day for professional work, putting in some time to learn it pays dividends. For both Vim and IDEs. [0]: In vim parlance, this is effectively what "movements" operate on. They sort of define these objects via implication.
adlpz 5y ago
I'm not saying that yours is necessarily the case, of course I don't know, but I feel like lots of people that hold opinions like yours greatly underestimate the amount of functionality that comes with something like a Jetbrains IDE. It's not even about the editor itself, nor the graphical or UX stuff. It's the crazy level of introspection and of understanding your code those IDEs bring. My daily experience is just insanely better than with anything else I've tried. In something pretty weakly typed like PHP you can happily rename methods and classes, refactor and extract code, move around namespaces, and the IDE keeps track of everything for you. You also get very smart autocomplete, snippets, integrated debugger with REPL, the whole thing. I've played around with all sorts of vim and emacs distributions and settings and nothing ever came close. Maybe it's just I don't have the time to set it up propert ly. But if that's the case, it's still a point in my favor here.
- devin 5y ago
  For a long time I would have agreed, but LSP has democratized the space quite a bit. If an editor has a good LSP story, it’ll be able to do all of the renaming, extracting, finding references, etc.
  - dfinninger 5y ago
    Eventually, maybe. But Java, Python, and Go are just so good in the IntelliJ suite. Switching between VSCode at home and IntelliJ at work make it readily apparent that there’s still a gap.
- ilovecaching 5y ago
  I have used Jetbrains IDEA and Clion extensively to understand the other side. An IDEs heavy introspection isn’t necessary, and perhaps actively harmful towards writing and reading code. It’s rigid policy over tools like git is certainly actively harmful. If it takes an IDE to write your code, then it will likely take an IDE to read your code. They are tools that allow you to take shortcuts were you shouldn’t, and rob you of valuable knowledge. Programming is about thinking and continual learning and IDEs sell you the complete opposite. They help you build unsustainable projects where only a computer can understand the binary AND the source code. The other point here is that the gap between IDE and text editor has only gotten smaller over the years and was closed considerably by LSPs. It may not be a perfect match in features, but small niceties are not an excuse for using closed source spyware for your text editor. They also do not make the difference between the success or failure of one’s work.
almost 5y ago
As someone who uses Emacs for (almost) all my editing needs and has done for about 17 years I just don’t understand how you can have these beliefs. LSP-mode is great and now with things like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs getting setup and getting things reasonably configured is a lot easier. But still! VSCode is pretty cool and is easy to use right out of the box. It does some things with ease that would be very hard with Emacs. And JetBrains looks like it does some amazing stuff. I still end up sticking with Emacs myself, but the idea that that it’s perfect and simple and for everyone and that there’s no sensible reasons to use the other options is just insane.
- ilovecaching 5y ago
  It amazes me there are Emacs users that don’t understand the importance of free software. You’re using the editor devised by the free software foundation, but you only want to talk about convenience. Convenience is not an excuse to switch to corporate made closed source spyware.
  - efficax 5y ago
    How many of us do you think work on "free" software? I write proprietary software and i use proprietary software to do it because it pays my mortgage. I drank the fsf Kool aid as a kid, then i grew up and had to put a roof over my head and my children's. It's great that some people get to make a living producing free as in speech software, but that's kind of like getting into the NBA. The rest of us have to contend with reality
    - chriswarbo 5y ago
      You're presenting a false dichotomy: most software is neither proprietary or FOSS; it's in-house, custom-developed functionality, that's never released/available outside of the business that created it. Its only "user" is the business that made it; they have full access to the source (unless they deleted it; whoops!), are not bound by its copyright (since they're the owners), etc. The FSF has no problem with that. Although my first job was working on FOSS, all the ones since have been working on such bespoke, in-house software. To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen a job ad for proprietary software (as in, closed-source software that runs on end-user machines). A few subtleties: - Javascript is probably a glaring exception. Opinions differ on whether it should count as shipping proprietary software (the FSF think it is, many HNers probably consider it less clear-cut). For what it's worth, the little JS I've written professionally has always been of a progressive, site-still-works-without-it form. - Some of that never-released software may be accessible to others, e.g. Google's search software can be accessed via google.com. The AGPL has an interesting take on that particular niche. - Sometimes the human end-users of this software have very limited access/control over it, e.g. if Walmart maintains its own checkout software, those operating the checkouts probably can't access the source, etc. However, that's nothing to do with copyright, FOSS, etc. it's just a business decision, presumably covered by employment contracts (e.g. "in the course of your work you may be given access to computer systems; these are confidential, and you must not hack/compromise/etc.").
criddell 5y ago
You might be surprised that many of us use Vim or Emacs and also VSCode or Sublime or Visual Studio or IntelliJ or XCode or ... Every tool has strengths and weaknesses. Plus, some of us enjoy learning new tools and find it fun to switch things up occasionally.
- devin 5y ago
  Cheers to this. My primary is emacs, but I consider myself a pretty solid vim user, and I’ve been picking up VSCode for typescript stuff.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    Even the TypeScript LSP is extremely featureful in Emacs. I thought about using VS Code for that stuff, but decided to see how the experience was in Emacs first, and now I'm no longer considering VS Code.
ioseph 5y ago
I use neovim within vscode. All the power of vim but with intellisense and debugging working with minimal configuration. As for telemetry, all my work lives in Azure so I assume Microsoft are already collecting what they want about our codebase (which is publicly visible) already.
Ensorceled 5y ago
I've been using vi since 1985, built a suite of development tools based on a custom fork of Elvis in the 90's and have been using vim professionally since the mid 90's. I've dabbled with emacs on and off for most of the 80's and 90's, including supporting a subset of the Elvis tools on emacs. I still fire up emacs now and then to see what's up. The idea that either emacs or vim are a "0 fiddling" drop in replacement for Goland or Pycharm is ludicrous. I probably could get vim up to the point where I was as productive as I am with Goland/PyCharm but it would definitely NOT be a "0 fiddling" process. I can't believe debugging and learning a new code base would be ANYWHERE as easy with vim as with Goland/PyCharm. Also, both Goland and PyCharm have pretty good vim plugins so my day to day editing IS vim. Sometimes I hit stuff that I can do faster in actual vim and I switch over.
- abzug 5y ago
  Honest question from someone who never used any product from JetBrains: what those IDEs gives you in order to learn/debug a new codebase in such easy way?
  - lordgrenville 5y ago
    Not OP but having used both PyCharm and Emacs, I really like PyCharm's visual debugging - when at a breakpoint you can see all variables in memory, their types, dictionaries and objects are nested. A lot easier than vanilla pdb.
tored 5y ago
I remember when one of my first professional mentors jokingly said that all those years spent in university was to write your own .emacs file so you had one when your career started. He was a bit shocked that mine was almost empty.
TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
Cool, any thoughts on what's new in Emacs 28.1?

joe_fishfish 5y ago

Good luck writing an iOS app in emacs. (Well, good luck writing one in Xcode, for that matter.)

jonnycomputer 5y ago

With 0 fiddling? not my experience at all. has something changed? I use Emacs for lots of things, but I've long since changed to Pycharm for Python programming. That's been close to 0 fiddling for real. Its been pretty good for JS programming too.

zozbot234 5y ago

Does Emacs ship with LSP support out of the box? They've had a habit in the past of ignoring similar features that were arbitrarily perceived as "proprietary" or not open enough.

jaster 5y ago
Don't think out of the box, but https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode works rather well with emacs 28 from my experience. Emacs "distros" such as Spacemacs and Doomemacs both make using it a nearly "out of the box" experience. (not supporting the editor/ide war troll, just trying to contribute some useful info here)

monsieurbanana 5y ago

This kind of comment gives us emacs-users bad reputation. Emacs isn't perfect, dissing people that don't use it is not helping anyone.

lunarplague 5y ago

How do I go about learning emacs when my job requires me to work in a M$ environment, and I have limited free time? I tried learning and felt overwhelmed, and I would like to make strides to make vim or emacs my primary editors for home use, but Visual Studio / Jetbrains just make development incredibly easier to not let the tools prevent me from just writing the code.

NeutralForest 5y ago
There are "distributions" such as Doom Emacs or Lunar Vim to get started with a setup from the get-go. Otherwise, the website linked above is a good way to get started, there's also an integrated tutorial in Emacs (C-h t).

Bancakes 5y ago

You miss the point. I want to click 3 buttons and have a usable IDE. Nothing will ever replace visual studio's debugging GUI.

allarm 5y ago
Emacs it's not an IDE (out of the box), so it's not your use case, obviously.
- lunarplague 5y ago
  If OP wants to compare Emacs to Visual Studio and Jetbraines IDE's, then we are going to compare features.
  - allarm 5y ago
    Go ahead comparing apples and oranges, what can I say.
    - Bancakes 5y ago
      OP literally said emacs has extensions IDE's will never have.
      - NateEag 5y ago
        I've never seen an IDE with an equivalent to smart-dash-mode: http://malsyned.net/smart-dash.html http://malsyned.net/smart-dash.html
        Bancakes 5y ago
        That's nice, dear. Can you work with .vcxproj files?
        NateEag 5y ago

willbw 5y ago

I'm going to assume this isn't trolling and if it is, you fooled me. I've use Vim professionally, as well as VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs and dabbled in Emacs - the idea that one can replicate what IntelliJ does for Java for instance in any other IDE or text editor is to me, nonsensical. The amount of configuration it would require in vim/neovim/vscode to replicate the refactoring ability of IntelliJ alone would take you longer to setup than it would to code whatever project you're working on. Saying that Vim or Emacs have "zero fiddling" compared to Jetbrains IDEs is a statement that is so vastly different to my experience (doing plenty of fiddling in both) that I would love to hear the backstory of how IDEs hurt you.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ilovecaching 5y ago
Emacs distributions are built for people who want zero fiddling. Fiddling in of itself is not bad. Fiddling is how you learn, and this is a profession that requires constant learning and tinkering. Most of features of a modern IDE are unnecessary or are actively harmful to developing good code. Thinking, taking your time, writing as little code as possible, and organizing a project so it can be easily understood and modified with nothing other than a text editor are positives that an IDE actively inhibits by trying to be helpful.
- fredoliveira 5y ago
  You're going back and forth. On your first post, you talk about all the things Emacs/Vim have that VSCode/Jetbrains can't possibly have. On this one, you talk about how less features is a good thing. Regardless of where you actually stand on that particular point, you're still comparing apples to oranges. It is also worth noting that I have never had an issue jumping from vim to VSCode (or vice-versa) on the same project. Neither of the two need any extra metadata or configuration. They just work, and I'll choose whichever tool makes sense for whatever I'm doing at the moment. As, frankly, I think everyone should. This fixation over one specific type of tool over another is unnecessary: go with whatever you are most productive with.

mateuszf 5y ago

> It amazes me that developers pick closed source Jetbrains JetBrains Intellij Idea Community Edition is open source

ilovecaching 5y ago
Jetbrains products are only partially open source, which makes them non-free and still spyware due to telemetry we can’t see.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  Do you have a reference for "Jetbrains products are ... spyware due to telemetry we can’t see."
  - ziml77 5y ago
    That's the "beauty" of phrasing it like that. It's impossible to prove or disprove.
  - jawilson2 5y ago
    It is packed in a small teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    If the source code of what you are running is not fully available, assume it contains telemetry or data collection.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      I assume every stranger that calls me is a scammer. That does NOT mean that everyone who calls me IS a scammer.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  > Jetbrains products are only partially open source You mean the repository at [0] contains code which is not licensed under an open source license? The only license mentioned at the root is Apache 2. [0] https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

bennyp101 5y ago

"you can have a full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling" - that is 100% not a thing that has ever happened to me whenever I go and look at emacs/vim! Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore, and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button ...

rayiner 5y ago
Emacs isn’t a modal editor!
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  I refer to it as a chorded editor. Of course there is viper mode.
- bennyp101 5y ago
  That's true, my bad. I've just only ever used it with evil (I find the chords even harder to remember!)
youerbt 5y ago
As long as your input device is optimized for inserting text (and your keyboard certainly is) modal editing is surely something desirable for programming.
epicide 5y ago
I agree that neither vim nor emacs are "0 fiddling" [0]. However, > Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore Honestly, I'm not sure it was ever "needed", but that's not really the point IMO. It's hard for me to think about editing text in any way other than how Vim handles it. Part of that is admittedly just familiarity, but I think there's also something to the idea of treating strings as more than just arrays of characters. Once you start thinking about your text and code as nouns of various sizes and granularity [0], losing those feels cumbersome. In order to achieve the latter, you either need modality or a huge number of control hotkeys. Vim takes the former approach while Emacs (and IDEs) takes the latter. So yes, you can achieve the "crowning feature" of Vim (IMO) without modality, but I don't see modality itself as being a pro or a con as much as a design choice. If you don't prefer it, more power to you. > and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button ... This also works the other way. I don't want to have to learn where all the buttons are in $IDE just to move my text about. Thankfully, many IDEs include a Vim mode or plugin for it, but those are never quite the same. Every tool has some level of learning curve. If you want it to be more flexible, powerful, and to get the most out of it, that learning curve is gonna be steeper. That goes for both IDEs with their buttons and Vim with its modal commands. For something that you might use for hours on end every single day for professional work, putting in some time to learn it pays dividends. For both Vim and IDEs. [0]: In vim parlance, this is effectively what "movements" operate on. They sort of define these objects via implication.

adlpz 5y ago

I'm not saying that yours is necessarily the case, of course I don't know, but I feel like lots of people that hold opinions like yours greatly underestimate the amount of functionality that comes with something like a Jetbrains IDE. It's not even about the editor itself, nor the graphical or UX stuff. It's the crazy level of introspection and of understanding your code those IDEs bring. My daily experience is just insanely better than with anything else I've tried. In something pretty weakly typed like PHP you can happily rename methods and classes, refactor and extract code, move around namespaces, and the IDE keeps track of everything for you. You also get very smart autocomplete, snippets, integrated debugger with REPL, the whole thing. I've played around with all sorts of vim and emacs distributions and settings and nothing ever came close. Maybe it's just I don't have the time to set it up propert ly. But if that's the case, it's still a point in my favor here.

devin 5y ago
For a long time I would have agreed, but LSP has democratized the space quite a bit. If an editor has a good LSP story, it’ll be able to do all of the renaming, extracting, finding references, etc.
- dfinninger 5y ago
  Eventually, maybe. But Java, Python, and Go are just so good in the IntelliJ suite. Switching between VSCode at home and IntelliJ at work make it readily apparent that there’s still a gap.
ilovecaching 5y ago
I have used Jetbrains IDEA and Clion extensively to understand the other side. An IDEs heavy introspection isn’t necessary, and perhaps actively harmful towards writing and reading code. It’s rigid policy over tools like git is certainly actively harmful. If it takes an IDE to write your code, then it will likely take an IDE to read your code. They are tools that allow you to take shortcuts were you shouldn’t, and rob you of valuable knowledge. Programming is about thinking and continual learning and IDEs sell you the complete opposite. They help you build unsustainable projects where only a computer can understand the binary AND the source code. The other point here is that the gap between IDE and text editor has only gotten smaller over the years and was closed considerably by LSPs. It may not be a perfect match in features, but small niceties are not an excuse for using closed source spyware for your text editor. They also do not make the difference between the success or failure of one’s work.

almost 5y ago

As someone who uses Emacs for (almost) all my editing needs and has done for about 17 years I just don’t understand how you can have these beliefs. LSP-mode is great and now with things like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs getting setup and getting things reasonably configured is a lot easier. But still! VSCode is pretty cool and is easy to use right out of the box. It does some things with ease that would be very hard with Emacs. And JetBrains looks like it does some amazing stuff. I still end up sticking with Emacs myself, but the idea that that it’s perfect and simple and for everyone and that there’s no sensible reasons to use the other options is just insane.

ilovecaching 5y ago
It amazes me there are Emacs users that don’t understand the importance of free software. You’re using the editor devised by the free software foundation, but you only want to talk about convenience. Convenience is not an excuse to switch to corporate made closed source spyware.
- efficax 5y ago
  How many of us do you think work on "free" software? I write proprietary software and i use proprietary software to do it because it pays my mortgage. I drank the fsf Kool aid as a kid, then i grew up and had to put a roof over my head and my children's. It's great that some people get to make a living producing free as in speech software, but that's kind of like getting into the NBA. The rest of us have to contend with reality
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    You're presenting a false dichotomy: most software is neither proprietary or FOSS; it's in-house, custom-developed functionality, that's never released/available outside of the business that created it. Its only "user" is the business that made it; they have full access to the source (unless they deleted it; whoops!), are not bound by its copyright (since they're the owners), etc. The FSF has no problem with that. Although my first job was working on FOSS, all the ones since have been working on such bespoke, in-house software. To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen a job ad for proprietary software (as in, closed-source software that runs on end-user machines). A few subtleties: - Javascript is probably a glaring exception. Opinions differ on whether it should count as shipping proprietary software (the FSF think it is, many HNers probably consider it less clear-cut). For what it's worth, the little JS I've written professionally has always been of a progressive, site-still-works-without-it form. - Some of that never-released software may be accessible to others, e.g. Google's search software can be accessed via google.com. The AGPL has an interesting take on that particular niche. - Sometimes the human end-users of this software have very limited access/control over it, e.g. if Walmart maintains its own checkout software, those operating the checkouts probably can't access the source, etc. However, that's nothing to do with copyright, FOSS, etc. it's just a business decision, presumably covered by employment contracts (e.g. "in the course of your work you may be given access to computer systems; these are confidential, and you must not hack/compromise/etc.").

criddell 5y ago

You might be surprised that many of us use Vim or Emacs and also VSCode or Sublime or Visual Studio or IntelliJ or XCode or ... Every tool has strengths and weaknesses. Plus, some of us enjoy learning new tools and find it fun to switch things up occasionally.

devin 5y ago
Cheers to this. My primary is emacs, but I consider myself a pretty solid vim user, and I’ve been picking up VSCode for typescript stuff.
- seanw444 5y ago
  Even the TypeScript LSP is extremely featureful in Emacs. I thought about using VS Code for that stuff, but decided to see how the experience was in Emacs first, and now I'm no longer considering VS Code.

ioseph 5y ago

I use neovim within vscode. All the power of vim but with intellisense and debugging working with minimal configuration. As for telemetry, all my work lives in Azure so I assume Microsoft are already collecting what they want about our codebase (which is publicly visible) already.

Ensorceled 5y ago

I've been using vi since 1985, built a suite of development tools based on a custom fork of Elvis in the 90's and have been using vim professionally since the mid 90's. I've dabbled with emacs on and off for most of the 80's and 90's, including supporting a subset of the Elvis tools on emacs. I still fire up emacs now and then to see what's up. The idea that either emacs or vim are a "0 fiddling" drop in replacement for Goland or Pycharm is ludicrous. I probably could get vim up to the point where I was as productive as I am with Goland/PyCharm but it would definitely NOT be a "0 fiddling" process. I can't believe debugging and learning a new code base would be ANYWHERE as easy with vim as with Goland/PyCharm. Also, both Goland and PyCharm have pretty good vim plugins so my day to day editing IS vim. Sometimes I hit stuff that I can do faster in actual vim and I switch over.

abzug 5y ago
Honest question from someone who never used any product from JetBrains: what those IDEs gives you in order to learn/debug a new codebase in such easy way?
- lordgrenville 5y ago
  Not OP but having used both PyCharm and Emacs, I really like PyCharm's visual debugging - when at a breakpoint you can see all variables in memory, their types, dictionaries and objects are nested. A lot easier than vanilla pdb.

tored 5y ago

I remember when one of my first professional mentors jokingly said that all those years spent in university was to write your own .emacs file so you had one when your career started. He was a bit shocked that mine was almost empty.

TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago

Cool, any thoughts on what's new in Emacs 28.1?