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Don't feel inferior for not using vim. People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. T

by WayneDB 14y ago

Don't feel inferior for not using vim. People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. There are absolutely no absolutes!

sunnybythesea 14y ago
I agree...eventually it's personal preference. Use whatever works for you. I gave up on vim multiple times before it finally started to make sense...now I use it on all my platforms and take my vimrc with me.
chimeracoder 14y ago
> There are absolutely no absolutes! and then: > People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. Yes, you add the word "typically" in there, so it's not technically an absolute, but really, what you're saying is not much better. I'm not going to tell you that you need to abandon your IDE, but I use a DDE centered around Vim, and I like to think that I don't necessarily have a narrow world-view as a result of that choice, thank you very much.
- carbocation 14y ago
  That's not a response to his point. His point is not that vim users have a narrow worldview. His point is that people who claim that vim is the ultimate environment have a narrow worldview. Reading a tiny bit into what he said, he's judging those who would see their editor of choice as the ultimate, i.e., as seeing those who don't use it as using an inferior tool.
  - sp4rki 14y ago
    Well I claim vim is the ultimate editor (as it is my preference and opinion), and at the same time I can say that: Not only do I prefer Visual Studio when working on dot net stuff, AND not only do I prefer Eclipse most of the time when working with JAVA while using GUI Linux... but they're both most definitely a better choice than Vim in both cases. Using vim in both cases would be using the inferior tool. So he's wrong on his generalization. Moving along... Honestly, what is the damn point anyways? He made a completely useless comment based on a bs assumption that in all honestly sounds more like a person who just got frustrated and decided to go against the flow of the river. I find it very annoying. Specially since this discussion always seems to start because the other side starts making the same generalization over and over and over again. Now I'm more annoyed. Hah.
slurgfest 14y ago
Rather than just making baseless assertions about people who favor vim or emacs, please mention an IDE with the same maturity, community, cross-platform support, cross-language support, and customizability as either vim or emacs. To pick just one random alternative, let's take gedit. It looks simple and standard, which is nice. It's newer, that could be OK. It can be installed on more than one platform (though not necessarily simply). It has the major features, it's basically feature-complete. For fancier stuff and language-specific tools, you can write plugins with Python, which makes all kinds of things possible. On the other hand, it can get crashy when you use a few plugins - maturity issue. There are few plugins and fewer actively maintained because there's not a big community to support and build on it. A lot of its behavior is reasonable but not really customizable. Random example - if I personally want to have a simpler interface in the vein of scribes or WriteRoom, I'm SOL. Of course, gedit simply cannot be used from a terminal, so you will use another editor for that, with its own keybindings etc. Most of the good editors have a story like this. Even if it seems to work great and be flexible enough, the community and plugins aren't there. If your goal is only (say) to write C# for Windows, Visual Studio is probably best. If you only want to write Java, (say) IDEA is probably best. These are powerful environments. But only for certain things, and in a certain way. If you want to code on another platform, different language, really change the behavior, get around a bug, or get a fancy new capability without paying a vendor lots of money, you are just going to hit limits and have to pick up yet another tool. If you've learned vim or emacs then you at least have a default which licks all these issues at once. In this sense they are "ultimate editors". And this is an opinion informed by broad usage of many editors.
- WayneDB 14y ago
  I'm speaking from personal experience, so no it's not at all baseless. Furthermore, I don't need to satisfy your list of requirements. Those are your requirements. I want my apps built with the best power-tool that was designed for the target platform. Your list of requirements didn't include that. So, for you maybe something like vim is the "ultimate editor", but for me it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement. I don't think anyone's a bad person if they really like vim, but it just seems to me that people who think that usually just can't imagine why anyone would not make the same choice as them.
martinced 14y ago
"People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience." That's not what people "typically" claim. People typically claim that the "text editor" part of NetBeans / Eclipse / IntelliJ IDEA / Visual C# / etc. do s*ck big monkey balls compared to vim / Emacs. There are even people who go as far as writing client/server mode for IDEs allowing to "plugin" either vim/emacs inside your IDE or to call your IDE's feature from vim/emacs (cue eclim / emacs-eclim ). That the "text editor" part of the big IDEs are totally inferior and utter crap compared to vim / emacs is not exactly something open up for debate ; )

by WayneDB 14y ago

Don't feel inferior for not using vim. People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. There are absolutely no absolutes!

sunnybythesea 14y ago

I agree...eventually it's personal preference. Use whatever works for you. I gave up on vim multiple times before it finally started to make sense...now I use it on all my platforms and take my vimrc with me.

chimeracoder 14y ago

> There are absolutely no absolutes! and then: > People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. Yes, you add the word "typically" in there, so it's not technically an absolute, but really, what you're saying is not much better. I'm not going to tell you that you need to abandon your IDE, but I use a DDE centered around Vim, and I like to think that I don't necessarily have a narrow world-view as a result of that choice, thank you very much.

carbocation 14y ago
That's not a response to his point. His point is not that vim users have a narrow worldview. His point is that people who claim that vim is the ultimate environment have a narrow worldview. Reading a tiny bit into what he said, he's judging those who would see their editor of choice as the ultimate, i.e., as seeing those who don't use it as using an inferior tool.
- sp4rki 14y ago
  Well I claim vim is the ultimate editor (as it is my preference and opinion), and at the same time I can say that: Not only do I prefer Visual Studio when working on dot net stuff, AND not only do I prefer Eclipse most of the time when working with JAVA while using GUI Linux... but they're both most definitely a better choice than Vim in both cases. Using vim in both cases would be using the inferior tool. So he's wrong on his generalization. Moving along... Honestly, what is the damn point anyways? He made a completely useless comment based on a bs assumption that in all honestly sounds more like a person who just got frustrated and decided to go against the flow of the river. I find it very annoying. Specially since this discussion always seems to start because the other side starts making the same generalization over and over and over again. Now I'm more annoyed. Hah.

slurgfest 14y ago

Rather than just making baseless assertions about people who favor vim or emacs, please mention an IDE with the same maturity, community, cross-platform support, cross-language support, and customizability as either vim or emacs. To pick just one random alternative, let's take gedit. It looks simple and standard, which is nice. It's newer, that could be OK. It can be installed on more than one platform (though not necessarily simply). It has the major features, it's basically feature-complete. For fancier stuff and language-specific tools, you can write plugins with Python, which makes all kinds of things possible. On the other hand, it can get crashy when you use a few plugins - maturity issue. There are few plugins and fewer actively maintained because there's not a big community to support and build on it. A lot of its behavior is reasonable but not really customizable. Random example - if I personally want to have a simpler interface in the vein of scribes or WriteRoom, I'm SOL. Of course, gedit simply cannot be used from a terminal, so you will use another editor for that, with its own keybindings etc. Most of the good editors have a story like this. Even if it seems to work great and be flexible enough, the community and plugins aren't there. If your goal is only (say) to write C# for Windows, Visual Studio is probably best. If you only want to write Java, (say) IDEA is probably best. These are powerful environments. But only for certain things, and in a certain way. If you want to code on another platform, different language, really change the behavior, get around a bug, or get a fancy new capability without paying a vendor lots of money, you are just going to hit limits and have to pick up yet another tool. If you've learned vim or emacs then you at least have a default which licks all these issues at once. In this sense they are "ultimate editors". And this is an opinion informed by broad usage of many editors.

WayneDB 14y ago
I'm speaking from personal experience, so no it's not at all baseless. Furthermore, I don't need to satisfy your list of requirements. Those are your requirements. I want my apps built with the best power-tool that was designed for the target platform. Your list of requirements didn't include that. So, for you maybe something like vim is the "ultimate editor", but for me it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement. I don't think anyone's a bad person if they really like vim, but it just seems to me that people who think that usually just can't imagine why anyone would not make the same choice as them.

martinced 14y ago

"People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience." That's not what people "typically" claim. People typically claim that the "text editor" part of NetBeans / Eclipse / IntelliJ IDEA / Visual C# / etc. do s*ck big monkey balls compared to vim / Emacs. There are even people who go as far as writing client/server mode for IDEs allowing to "plugin" either vim/emacs inside your IDE or to call your IDE's feature from vim/emacs (cue eclim / emacs-eclim ). That the "text editor" part of the big IDEs are totally inferior and utter crap compared to vim / emacs is not exactly something open up for debate ; )