4 ms·

Anyone still willing to change editors has not yet put much of a worthwhile investment of time in a good one. Choosing an editor is probably a lot like finding

Anyone still willing to change editors has not yet put much of a worthwhile investment of time in a good one. Choosing an editor is probably a lot like finding a soulmate.

grayrest 14y ago
Vim is my primary text editor and I'll never switch to an editor that doesn't have a command grammar but there's most definitely room for improvement: * It's difficult to add new motions to vim. EasyMotion and Surround.vim are the only two real attempts I know of. EasyMotion gets by on marks while surround.vim is baroque. * There's little/no context awareness built into the syntax highlighting/grammar files. Textmate's scope stuff is really the best feature of the editor. If the vim maintainers/community could decide on syntax groupings and a query system was added it'd be doable but I'm not really expecting it. * There's limited context awareness built into the mapping system. ST's system is quite nice here. * No support for multiple cursors. The support that's built into ST is fairly primitive compared to the multicusor whitepapers from MIT (I believe around 2000) which did generic editing stuff. * No repl. This goes against the philosophy of the editor but having a repl is really convenient when doing lisps. Foreplay is sufficient but doesn't fill me with joy. * I've wanted to set up what I call 'regions' in the file where one part of the file is a computed version of another. The obvious use case is xml tags where editing one tag name in the pair updates the other but I think it could be generic. I had more use cases when I was thinking about it but they're not coming to mind at the moment. I think there is potential for interesting display/visualization stuff for the HTML based editors and integration into the runtime like Smalltalk environments. I'd also like to see some sort of AST manipulation server pop up and to provide IDE-like services in a cross-editor manner. Finally, I spent time with LEO in the early 2000s and while I hated the editing, the text node organization was interesting and I haven't seen a similar attempt elsewhere. Don't get me wrong, there ARE new things in Vim that are unique/cool like conceal and I can do fun/weird stuff with UltiSnips which I haven't been able to do with other snippet systems. I doubt I'll move off any time soon but it's far from inconceivable.
- btipling 14y ago
  'regions' sounds like you want software generated code...which sounds more like maybe you need to think about your architecture/process a little more. You can generate code with a build step.
  - grayrest 14y ago
    Code generation would be possible but in my head it's more like paredit where edits operate on the underlying structure of the code. Going back to the XML example. The contents of the ending tag are the contents of the first WORD of the starting tag. A syntax file could set up a region between the two so that changing one tag alters the other. Similarly a syntax file could set up a one way region from function arguments to local uses such that altering the argument name updates the local uses. It's possible to do this via AST manipulation at build time but I don't think it's practical.
    - btipling 14y ago
      I think you want to generate your XML with a template maybe.
      - swift 14y ago
        Why all this "you want"? I realize it's just a turn of phrase that you are probably using without thinking, but seriously: don't you think grayrest knows what he/she wants better than you do? Structure editors are extremely useful and do not solve the same problem as templates at all.
- Flenser 14y ago
  Are you aware of Evil[1] for Emacs? It also has a surround mode[2] to emulate vim's. [1] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil [2] https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround
  - 14y ago
jamesrcole 14y ago
There's also people choosing a text-editor to start off with.
rogerbinns 14y ago
I ask developers what their favourite editor is in interviews. I don't particularly care what the answer is (although Notepad would be a bit of a black mark) but rather to see if they try to improve their productivity.

Anyone still willing to change editors has not yet put much of a worthwhile investment of time in a good one. Choosing an editor is probably a lot like finding a soulmate.

grayrest 14y ago

Vim is my primary text editor and I'll never switch to an editor that doesn't have a command grammar but there's most definitely room for improvement: * It's difficult to add new motions to vim. EasyMotion and Surround.vim are the only two real attempts I know of. EasyMotion gets by on marks while surround.vim is baroque. * There's little/no context awareness built into the syntax highlighting/grammar files. Textmate's scope stuff is really the best feature of the editor. If the vim maintainers/community could decide on syntax groupings and a query system was added it'd be doable but I'm not really expecting it. * There's limited context awareness built into the mapping system. ST's system is quite nice here. * No support for multiple cursors. The support that's built into ST is fairly primitive compared to the multicusor whitepapers from MIT (I believe around 2000) which did generic editing stuff. * No repl. This goes against the philosophy of the editor but having a repl is really convenient when doing lisps. Foreplay is sufficient but doesn't fill me with joy. * I've wanted to set up what I call 'regions' in the file where one part of the file is a computed version of another. The obvious use case is xml tags where editing one tag name in the pair updates the other but I think it could be generic. I had more use cases when I was thinking about it but they're not coming to mind at the moment. I think there is potential for interesting display/visualization stuff for the HTML based editors and integration into the runtime like Smalltalk environments. I'd also like to see some sort of AST manipulation server pop up and to provide IDE-like services in a cross-editor manner. Finally, I spent time with LEO in the early 2000s and while I hated the editing, the text node organization was interesting and I haven't seen a similar attempt elsewhere. Don't get me wrong, there ARE new things in Vim that are unique/cool like conceal and I can do fun/weird stuff with UltiSnips which I haven't been able to do with other snippet systems. I doubt I'll move off any time soon but it's far from inconceivable.

btipling 14y ago
'regions' sounds like you want software generated code...which sounds more like maybe you need to think about your architecture/process a little more. You can generate code with a build step.
- grayrest 14y ago
  Code generation would be possible but in my head it's more like paredit where edits operate on the underlying structure of the code. Going back to the XML example. The contents of the ending tag are the contents of the first WORD of the starting tag. A syntax file could set up a region between the two so that changing one tag alters the other. Similarly a syntax file could set up a one way region from function arguments to local uses such that altering the argument name updates the local uses. It's possible to do this via AST manipulation at build time but I don't think it's practical.
  - btipling 14y ago
    I think you want to generate your XML with a template maybe.
    - swift 14y ago
      Why all this "you want"? I realize it's just a turn of phrase that you are probably using without thinking, but seriously: don't you think grayrest knows what he/she wants better than you do? Structure editors are extremely useful and do not solve the same problem as templates at all.
Flenser 14y ago
Are you aware of Evil[1] for Emacs? It also has a surround mode[2] to emulate vim's. [1] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil [2] https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround
- 14y ago

jamesrcole 14y ago

There's also people choosing a text-editor to start off with.

rogerbinns 14y ago

I ask developers what their favourite editor is in interviews. I don't particularly care what the answer is (although Notepad would be a bit of a black mark) but rather to see if they try to improve their productivity.