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For the first time I am seriously considering whether to replace Emacs as my primary text editor on Linux. I've been compulsively using Emacs for the past 5 ye

For the first time I am seriously considering whether to replace Emacs as my primary text editor on Linux. I've been compulsively using Emacs for the past 5 years. Thanks to Emacs I felt in love with (a dialect of) Lisp and experienced the freedom brought by a truly programmable text editor. An enlighting experience. About a couple of weeks ago I began using Sublime Text 2 and... wow, it gets so many things right and out-of-the-box that I'm now fighting an inner battle to make a choice. I am by no means an "hardcore" Emacs user but over the years I accumulated more than seven hundred lines of elisp code in my ~/.emacs.d/init.el. A large portion of that file glues together stuff like ido-mode, ido-ubiquitous, smex, AutoComplete, find-file-in-project, etc making my Emacs a lot Sublime-like. I recently threw most of that stuff away and began working on sublime.el, which tries to emulate Sublime Text 2 as closely as possible. However Emacs is showing a lot of warts: ido's fuzzy matching becomes painfully slow when dealing with lots of entries, I have yet to make find-file-in-project behave the way I want, provide most-recently-used heuristics to ido (for any use case not covered by smex), there's no consistent way to set a unique indentation level across major modes, long startup times (though the emacs-as-a-daemon/emacsclient pair mitigates the issue somewhat) and, in general, the UI is antiquated¹. My only gripes with Sublime Text 2 are that there's nowhere near the amount of documentation Emacs has (for obvious reasons) and that it is a (mostly) proprietary piece of software. What if Jon is hit by a bus², looses interest in his project or finds it unprofitable and decides to stop all development? I would really, really hate to depend on a piece of software which is never going to get at least bug fixes. I honestly hope that Jon is considering open-sourcing it, should he go AWOL for any reason. By switching to Sublime Text 2 I feel like I am betraying Emacs and all it represents in the name of convenience. Choice, how paradoxical thou art! I am sorry if you find this disquisition boring but I had an urge to write it down somewhere. How liberating! __________ ¹ E.g. there's probably a way to get like find-file-in-project to show stuff as neatly as Sublime Text 2 does but as far as I know nobody has done it, yet. ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

manish_gill 15y ago
I was also a little hesitant to switch from Vim to Sublime Text 2, but I finally decided to do it. I run ST2 in Vim mode, which is easily configurable, and honestly, it's much more easier, does so many things right,and after adding just a few plugins (the package control being one of them), it has become my default text editor. And lets hope Jon doesn't get hit by a bus. :)
kstrauser 15y ago
You're not alone. I've used Emacs for over a decade, but I fell in love with ST2 almost immediately. And although it may cost me some cred with diehard Emacs users: I'd much rather extend my editor with Python than elisp. Still, Emacs is my bus factor backup plan. I prefer ST2 today, but it's nice knowing there's a pretty darn excellent fallback if it disappears for some reason.
- reddit_clone 15y ago
  I actually use other IDE's when appropriate (Eclipse, Visual studio and XCode etc.). But it is OrgMode that makes it impossible to ditch Emacs.
  - nieve 15y ago
    Org-mode is a big stumbling block for me as well and it seems like most of its features would be possible in Sublime Text 2, but the sheer degree of integration that it's managed with Emacs' various hooks and processes might be much harder. The various org-insinuate functions, the packages to hook it into magit (or rather ST2's equivalents) & Mew, etc. are all pretty important to me. I haven't looked deeply into customizing ST2, but is it actually feasible to hook into it so deeply? [ETA: There's a stab at an ST org-mode here that I tried previously, but really isn't very far along and development stopped almost a year ago: https://bitbucket.org/theblacklion/sublime_orgmode/ https://bitbucket.org/theblacklion/sublime_orgmode/ There's a fork at https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode that seems to be somewhat more active.]
5h 15y ago
wrt Bus Factor, for about one and a half years I used the E text editor, a textmate clone for windows backed by cygwin. The developer seems to have disappeared, I understand it was sort-of open sourced, but it lost momentum iirc, great shame as it was promising, I jumped ship back to Vi and am not about to move again after that!

manish_gill 15y ago

I was also a little hesitant to switch from Vim to Sublime Text 2, but I finally decided to do it. I run ST2 in Vim mode, which is easily configurable, and honestly, it's much more easier, does so many things right,and after adding just a few plugins (the package control being one of them), it has become my default text editor. And lets hope Jon doesn't get hit by a bus. :)

kstrauser 15y ago

You're not alone. I've used Emacs for over a decade, but I fell in love with ST2 almost immediately. And although it may cost me some cred with diehard Emacs users: I'd much rather extend my editor with Python than elisp. Still, Emacs is my bus factor backup plan. I prefer ST2 today, but it's nice knowing there's a pretty darn excellent fallback if it disappears for some reason.

reddit_clone 15y ago
I actually use other IDE's when appropriate (Eclipse, Visual studio and XCode etc.). But it is OrgMode that makes it impossible to ditch Emacs.
- nieve 15y ago
  Org-mode is a big stumbling block for me as well and it seems like most of its features would be possible in Sublime Text 2, but the sheer degree of integration that it's managed with Emacs' various hooks and processes might be much harder. The various org-insinuate functions, the packages to hook it into magit (or rather ST2's equivalents) & Mew, etc. are all pretty important to me. I haven't looked deeply into customizing ST2, but is it actually feasible to hook into it so deeply? [ETA: There's a stab at an ST org-mode here that I tried previously, but really isn't very far along and development stopped almost a year ago: https://bitbucket.org/theblacklion/sublime_orgmode/ https://bitbucket.org/theblacklion/sublime_orgmode/ There's a fork at https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode that seems to be somewhat more active.]

5h 15y ago

wrt Bus Factor, for about one and a half years I used the E text editor, a textmate clone for windows backed by cygwin. The developer seems to have disappeared, I understand it was sort-of open sourced, but it lost momentum iirc, great shame as it was promising, I jumped ship back to Vi and am not about to move again after that!