4 ms·

Emacs was a great editor just like Nirvana was a great band. It’s influenced every other editor after it. People are always going to love it. But I think all t

Emacs was a great editor just like Nirvana was a great band. It’s influenced every other editor after it. People are always going to love it. But I think all the best ideas from that era have been taken. I like Vim but EMacs won the editor wars

hiq 4y ago
I guess you can make the same statements about vim, given that there's a vim mode in most popular IDEs.
- esparrohack 4y ago
  But as an addon. No one stole modal editing and the quirky key bindings as a core feature. The real split was whether people wanted an editor to work like an IDE or not. Everyone did. Even Vim. I think it makes more sense they are there for those of us who know Vim but one day we’ll all die out
- sph 4y ago
  vim is an editing system. Emacs is a platform centered around text.
scombridae 4y ago
I like vim but emacs won the editor wars It's hard to imagine a definition of "win" that goes from roughly 50% popularity to less than 5%.
- esparrohack 4y ago
  No, because I said influence. You are thinking adoption. That actually boosts my point
bergheim 4y ago
> Emacs was a great editor just like Nirvana was a great band. It’s influenced every other editor after it. Eh.. Which every other editor would that be? There is a mode [0] you can enable just because of how different it is to every other popular editor ever. Still. 0: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode
- esparrohack 4y ago
  Ooo we could go on forever. Let’s start with VS Code. What we want to do is list features. For example, people prefer the GUI and the mouse, non-modal, batteries included. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just been a while. Those editors were written for a time that don’t exist anymore.
  - bergheim 4y ago
    That's my point. How did emacs influence this? Emacs is nothing like that. If anything, emacs has failed. Everything else is either proprietary or company/plugin based. And mouse based. Imagine spending 8 hours a day for the rest of your life and you still want a cursor based popup telling you what you might or might not want to do instead of having muscle memory of what you do.
    - esparrohack 4y ago
      Emacs had a GUI and mouse support forever on Windows. It was “bloated and slow”. Yeah the free software stuff didn’t work but that’s not all the editor wars were about. I think we’re just missing each other here. The best features of eMacs spread to other editors. As for the scenario, I don’t see that as a hellish situation. I’ve been using vim for a while. Im actually ok at it. Do I regret learning it? Hell yeah. Lol. But at least I got vim mode to soothe the wound a little
      - bergheim 4y ago
        > Emacs had a GUI and mouse support forever on Windows. Emacs did not invent the mouse cursor interface. > It was “bloated and slow”. This comes from not understanding how emacs works. Yes, it has games, no, it is not loaded until you load it. It means nothing, it does not mean bloat. > I think we’re just missing each other here. The best features of eMacs spread to other editors. I think we might - it's Emacs not eMacs. > As for the scenario, I don’t see that as a hellish situation. I’ve been using vim for a while. Im actually ok at it. Great! I love vim. In fact I used it for 15 years before switching. I would not be using emacs as my everything if evil-mode was not a thing. > Do I regret learning it? Hell yeah. Lol. But at least I got vim mode to soothe the wound a little Sometimes I think the same thing.. Everytime there is no vi mode I get annoyed. I try to be open to new software, but cua-mode (or default emacs keys) is not it for me.
tikhonj 4y ago
The key with Emacs is that it's an editor that grows: the close mapping between the editor and its code makes it more fluid and natural to extend than any other popular tool I've tried. It's a fuzzy distinction—not something you can put on a feature checklist—but it's made working with Emacs qualitatively different from working with other tools. While Emacs has certainly influenced other editors, none of the ones I'm familiar with have carried over this core philosophy.
- esparrohack 4y ago
  I get that but in this case I’m only interested in the features that were so influential, and the reasons behind that. I don’t think EMacs or Vim will come back. They have revivals, I came in during one of those. This is definitely one of them.

hiq 4y ago

I guess you can make the same statements about vim, given that there's a vim mode in most popular IDEs.

esparrohack 4y ago
But as an addon. No one stole modal editing and the quirky key bindings as a core feature. The real split was whether people wanted an editor to work like an IDE or not. Everyone did. Even Vim. I think it makes more sense they are there for those of us who know Vim but one day we’ll all die out
sph 4y ago
vim is an editing system. Emacs is a platform centered around text.

scombridae 4y ago

I like vim but emacs won the editor wars It's hard to imagine a definition of "win" that goes from roughly 50% popularity to less than 5%.

esparrohack 4y ago
No, because I said influence. You are thinking adoption. That actually boosts my point

bergheim 4y ago

> Emacs was a great editor just like Nirvana was a great band. It’s influenced every other editor after it. Eh.. Which every other editor would that be? There is a mode [0] you can enable just because of how different it is to every other popular editor ever. Still. 0: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode

esparrohack 4y ago
Ooo we could go on forever. Let’s start with VS Code. What we want to do is list features. For example, people prefer the GUI and the mouse, non-modal, batteries included. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just been a while. Those editors were written for a time that don’t exist anymore.
- bergheim 4y ago
  That's my point. How did emacs influence this? Emacs is nothing like that. If anything, emacs has failed. Everything else is either proprietary or company/plugin based. And mouse based. Imagine spending 8 hours a day for the rest of your life and you still want a cursor based popup telling you what you might or might not want to do instead of having muscle memory of what you do.
  - esparrohack 4y ago
    Emacs had a GUI and mouse support forever on Windows. It was “bloated and slow”. Yeah the free software stuff didn’t work but that’s not all the editor wars were about. I think we’re just missing each other here. The best features of eMacs spread to other editors. As for the scenario, I don’t see that as a hellish situation. I’ve been using vim for a while. Im actually ok at it. Do I regret learning it? Hell yeah. Lol. But at least I got vim mode to soothe the wound a little
    - bergheim 4y ago
      > Emacs had a GUI and mouse support forever on Windows. Emacs did not invent the mouse cursor interface. > It was “bloated and slow”. This comes from not understanding how emacs works. Yes, it has games, no, it is not loaded until you load it. It means nothing, it does not mean bloat. > I think we’re just missing each other here. The best features of eMacs spread to other editors. I think we might - it's Emacs not eMacs. > As for the scenario, I don’t see that as a hellish situation. I’ve been using vim for a while. Im actually ok at it. Great! I love vim. In fact I used it for 15 years before switching. I would not be using emacs as my everything if evil-mode was not a thing. > Do I regret learning it? Hell yeah. Lol. But at least I got vim mode to soothe the wound a little Sometimes I think the same thing.. Everytime there is no vi mode I get annoyed. I try to be open to new software, but cua-mode (or default emacs keys) is not it for me.

tikhonj 4y ago

The key with Emacs is that it's an editor that grows: the close mapping between the editor and its code makes it more fluid and natural to extend than any other popular tool I've tried. It's a fuzzy distinction—not something you can put on a feature checklist—but it's made working with Emacs qualitatively different from working with other tools. While Emacs has certainly influenced other editors, none of the ones I'm familiar with have carried over this core philosophy.

esparrohack 4y ago
I get that but in this case I’m only interested in the features that were so influential, and the reasons behind that. I don’t think EMacs or Vim will come back. They have revivals, I came in during one of those. This is definitely one of them.