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i'm emacs, i'm really addicted to macro editing, before that i was teco which also has macro editing. I'm not aware that vim has macro editing but I learned a b

i'm emacs, i'm really addicted to macro editing, before that i was teco which also has macro editing. I'm not aware that vim has macro editing but I learned a bit of vi a long time ago, so what do I know. (Hearing that vim has macro editing would give me enthusiasm to learn it.) BBedit, ELI5, what am I missing? I know it's been popular a long time but I don't know what it does/why people like it so much

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
re: vim I sometimes accidentally press q and see “recording @a” in the corner, which means I need to press q again to stop recording whatever garbled nonsense series of commands just got recorded. I think that would be called a macro but I could be mistaken.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  i see you and i have at least similar experiences with vim :) stuff happens and my main problem is usually "how do I get out of this?"
kstrauser 3y ago
I love Emacs and its macros. I’m also a big fan of multi-cursor editors. BBEdit instead has amazing grep-style find and replace. It’s different from the others, in a way I found I really like. Also, instead of extending it with elisp or maybe JavaScript, I add stuff to BBEdit with shell scripts or other CLI commands that read stdin and write to stdout. If you’re used to composing pipelines in a shell, BBEdit’s text filters and the like feel like second nature. I’m a recent convert. When version 14 came out with LSP support, it became viable to me. It feels every bit as good at handling Python, Rust, and TypeScript (the 3 languages I’ve written most recently) as Emacs, which is high praise from me.
retrac 3y ago
> I know it's been popular a long time That alone may explain part of it. BBEdit was on the Macs I used in school back in the 1990s; the keybindings haven't changed since. It carries forward as an institution in the Mac world, like vi or emacs, with many users using it primarily because it's what they already know. Also, a limited version of it (what I first used!) was available for free for many years. Back when free GUI editors were rare, particularly on the Mac. Shareware-style distribution advantage there.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

re: vim I sometimes accidentally press q and see “recording @a” in the corner, which means I need to press q again to stop recording whatever garbled nonsense series of commands just got recorded. I think that would be called a macro but I could be mistaken.

fsckboy 3y ago
i see you and i have at least similar experiences with vim :) stuff happens and my main problem is usually "how do I get out of this?"

kstrauser 3y ago

I love Emacs and its macros. I’m also a big fan of multi-cursor editors. BBEdit instead has amazing grep-style find and replace. It’s different from the others, in a way I found I really like. Also, instead of extending it with elisp or maybe JavaScript, I add stuff to BBEdit with shell scripts or other CLI commands that read stdin and write to stdout. If you’re used to composing pipelines in a shell, BBEdit’s text filters and the like feel like second nature. I’m a recent convert. When version 14 came out with LSP support, it became viable to me. It feels every bit as good at handling Python, Rust, and TypeScript (the 3 languages I’ve written most recently) as Emacs, which is high praise from me.

retrac 3y ago

> I know it's been popular a long time That alone may explain part of it. BBEdit was on the Macs I used in school back in the 1990s; the keybindings haven't changed since. It carries forward as an institution in the Mac world, like vi or emacs, with many users using it primarily because it's what they already know. Also, a limited version of it (what I first used!) was available for free for many years. Back when free GUI editors were rare, particularly on the Mac. Shareware-style distribution advantage there.