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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

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.
- sp4rki 14y ago
  1) Baseless or not - your generalization is just as bad (or even worse) as the inverse case. 2) He didn't tell you his list of requirements just so you would change your mind about whatever your opinion is at the moment. He did it to explain why people say what the say so fanatically. As a matter of fact, those weren't even requirements per se. 3) Regarding the "best power-tool" comment. His list of "requirements" DID INCLUDE what you just talked about. There are better tools than vim + command-line in specific cases - according to the GP - and he gave you examples of his opinion on such IDEs. Visual Studio is pretty much THE exemplary case, though I supplement it with ViEmu as editing code in a way that's not modal or having to use the arrow keys seems completely foreign to me after years of indoctrination. He made it clear that he believes that the people that go cookoo for vim + command-line or emacs are so adamant to call them the ultimate environments not only because they include/are better text editors than everything else in the market, but because they're expandable, mature, and portable. And let's not even get into the part that relates to working on a remote server through a terminal emulator. If you get ONE thing out of both the GP and my response today - let it be this: you say that vim is not the "ultimate editor" for you because it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement (being a power tool according to you)... Well, I'm pretty sure the primary requirement of each and every competent hacker regarding editors and IDE's should be to make the edition and creation of text easy, fast, streamlined, and efficient. I can count the text editors that fulfill that requirement to the T in a hand. Hell, there's three (or four if you dislike being productive). And one of them doesn't have a term version. 4) There are a few very specific tools/toolsets for very specific tasks in the programming world that make more sense to use than the classic "hardcore" editors. Hell in some cases they aren't necessarily better, but are obligatory! Nevertheless it doesn't change the fact that having either vim or emacs as tools in your bat-belt, will indelibly make a more productive developer by a factor of a quattuordecillion and one internet kittens. 5) I'm going to go ahead and make a generalization just as you did. "People who claim that vim/emacs are not the ultimate environment typically have a very naive world-view in my experience. Oh and in 98.64656% of the time (cause internet statistics are just as bad as generalizations) such claims come from people that failed to achieve proficiency in the aforementioned editors." Notwithstanding the foregoing, I don't think you're bad for disliking vim, and I can totally understand that personal preference, biases, opinions, and memories will dictate what editor you end up using. But pissing a bunch of geeks that love the editors in questions with a comment that sounds biggot-ish, elitist (as elitist as the people you're confronting), and egocentric, makes very little sense if you ask me.

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.

sp4rki 14y ago
1) Baseless or not - your generalization is just as bad (or even worse) as the inverse case. 2) He didn't tell you his list of requirements just so you would change your mind about whatever your opinion is at the moment. He did it to explain why people say what the say so fanatically. As a matter of fact, those weren't even requirements per se. 3) Regarding the "best power-tool" comment. His list of "requirements" DID INCLUDE what you just talked about. There are better tools than vim + command-line in specific cases - according to the GP - and he gave you examples of his opinion on such IDEs. Visual Studio is pretty much THE exemplary case, though I supplement it with ViEmu as editing code in a way that's not modal or having to use the arrow keys seems completely foreign to me after years of indoctrination. He made it clear that he believes that the people that go cookoo for vim + command-line or emacs are so adamant to call them the ultimate environments not only because they include/are better text editors than everything else in the market, but because they're expandable, mature, and portable. And let's not even get into the part that relates to working on a remote server through a terminal emulator. If you get ONE thing out of both the GP and my response today - let it be this: you say that vim is not the "ultimate editor" for you because it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement (being a power tool according to you)... Well, I'm pretty sure the primary requirement of each and every competent hacker regarding editors and IDE's should be to make the edition and creation of text easy, fast, streamlined, and efficient. I can count the text editors that fulfill that requirement to the T in a hand. Hell, there's three (or four if you dislike being productive). And one of them doesn't have a term version. 4) There are a few very specific tools/toolsets for very specific tasks in the programming world that make more sense to use than the classic "hardcore" editors. Hell in some cases they aren't necessarily better, but are obligatory! Nevertheless it doesn't change the fact that having either vim or emacs as tools in your bat-belt, will indelibly make a more productive developer by a factor of a quattuordecillion and one internet kittens. 5) I'm going to go ahead and make a generalization just as you did. "People who claim that vim/emacs are not the ultimate environment typically have a very naive world-view in my experience. Oh and in 98.64656% of the time (cause internet statistics are just as bad as generalizations) such claims come from people that failed to achieve proficiency in the aforementioned editors." Notwithstanding the foregoing, I don't think you're bad for disliking vim, and I can totally understand that personal preference, biases, opinions, and memories will dictate what editor you end up using. But pissing a bunch of geeks that love the editors in questions with a comment that sounds biggot-ish, elitist (as elitist as the people you're confronting), and egocentric, makes very little sense if you ask me.