4 ms·

I am a bit annoyed by all these emacs / vim / sublimetext vs. IDEs articles. In an IDE, the editor is a small part of the overall program, and it indeed does of

by larve 15y ago

I am a bit annoyed by all these emacs / vim / sublimetext vs. IDEs articles. In an IDE, the editor is a small part of the overall program, and it indeed does often suck compared to the godfathers. But it's such a small part of the actual task of working on software that I'm ok with a few tradeoffs. On the other hand, whoever ever tried to debug java or c++ in emacs, or even worse, debug a single app consisting of php, ruby and javascript in emacs is going to enter a world of pain. A task which is pretty easy to accomplish in Intellij IDEA. Eclipse makes it pretty easy to keep the muscle memory with its emacs+ mode, which is quite good (it even has ido and M-x). You lose the elisp, but have a real IDE nonetheless. It's all about the work you need to accomplish, I find myself much more productive with a less capable editor, but a full IDE. And I still use emacs a lot for org-mode, editing config files, writing smaller programs. But emulating full IDE features is just to painful (most of the time). The only area where Emacs is actually a brilliant IDE is when using SLIME (for Common Lisp and Clojure).

mattdeboard 15y ago
emacs is also an excellent IRC client.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
lallysingh 15y ago
Behind emacs and vim are two long stories of old programs constantly adapting to new environments, yet growing to have capabilities that IDEs never got. And frankly, eclipse's editor is crap.
rbanffy 15y ago
> But (the editor is) such a small part of the actual task of working on software that I'm ok with a few tradeoffs You have to understand Eclipse and the tools most people use it with evolved together for a long time. That creates this dependency between IDE and toolset - it's more or less impossible to be productive in Java without an IDE. There are, however, languages and technologies that didn't evolve together with IDEs and employ fairly easily hand-editable files instead of overly complicated things no human hand is supposed to touch. Emacs' brilliance is in how it's built in itself and how one can shape it to its needs. For instance, it took me a couple minutes to configure mine to start with different fontsizes and screen layout in accordance to the size of the monitor I'm using. I cannot imagine the level of insanity I would have to go through to do it on Eclipse.
- larve 15y ago
  What languages are these though? I switched over to eclipse for C/C++, and these are fairly well integrated in emacs to boot. I just find it more comfortable to write in that in eclipse, and most of the navigation and editing commands I have in emacs work perfectly fine in eclipse with emacs+. I moved over to intellij for java (of course), php + javascript + html (the ability to debug php and javascript side by side is very nice), and python (although that's one that works pretty well in emacs as well). I guess I'm biased though because i find the navigation layout and the autocompletion visually much nicer in editors like eclipse, whereas due to my laziness I never configured emacs to be "visual", I still use it inside tmux in a terminal, without graphical widgets. That said, I'm a happy multiuser, I'm just a bit tired of the emacs over everything, while IDEs have their own intrinsic advantages. Maybe I'm just a discokid, but I like having to click 2 buttons to update my pom.xml rather than going in by hand to edit the xml, or having to figure out if the maven.el file I found somewhere is still usable.
- sedachv 15y ago
  > it's more or less impossible to be productive in Java without an IDE At my last full-time Java job most of us used Emacs and we got along just fine. I think the real trick is not to write shit code. Another job I had I used a dialect of Lisp (won't name any names...) which relied pretty heavily on an IDE. It was painful to work in the IDE or in Emacs, but that's because it was shit code.

by larve 15y ago

mattdeboard 15y ago

emacs is also an excellent IRC client.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

lallysingh 15y ago

Behind emacs and vim are two long stories of old programs constantly adapting to new environments, yet growing to have capabilities that IDEs never got. And frankly, eclipse's editor is crap.

rbanffy 15y ago

> But (the editor is) such a small part of the actual task of working on software that I'm ok with a few tradeoffs You have to understand Eclipse and the tools most people use it with evolved together for a long time. That creates this dependency between IDE and toolset - it's more or less impossible to be productive in Java without an IDE. There are, however, languages and technologies that didn't evolve together with IDEs and employ fairly easily hand-editable files instead of overly complicated things no human hand is supposed to touch. Emacs' brilliance is in how it's built in itself and how one can shape it to its needs. For instance, it took me a couple minutes to configure mine to start with different fontsizes and screen layout in accordance to the size of the monitor I'm using. I cannot imagine the level of insanity I would have to go through to do it on Eclipse.

larve 15y ago
What languages are these though? I switched over to eclipse for C/C++, and these are fairly well integrated in emacs to boot. I just find it more comfortable to write in that in eclipse, and most of the navigation and editing commands I have in emacs work perfectly fine in eclipse with emacs+. I moved over to intellij for java (of course), php + javascript + html (the ability to debug php and javascript side by side is very nice), and python (although that's one that works pretty well in emacs as well). I guess I'm biased though because i find the navigation layout and the autocompletion visually much nicer in editors like eclipse, whereas due to my laziness I never configured emacs to be "visual", I still use it inside tmux in a terminal, without graphical widgets. That said, I'm a happy multiuser, I'm just a bit tired of the emacs over everything, while IDEs have their own intrinsic advantages. Maybe I'm just a discokid, but I like having to click 2 buttons to update my pom.xml rather than going in by hand to edit the xml, or having to figure out if the maven.el file I found somewhere is still usable.
sedachv 15y ago
> it's more or less impossible to be productive in Java without an IDE At my last full-time Java job most of us used Emacs and we got along just fine. I think the real trick is not to write shit code. Another job I had I used a dialect of Lisp (won't name any names...) which relied pretty heavily on an IDE. It was painful to work in the IDE or in Emacs, but that's because it was shit code.