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What I'm about to say comes down more to philosophical differences than differences of opinion about Sublime Text 2. I do not have extensive experience with Em

What I'm about to say comes down more to philosophical differences than differences of opinion about Sublime Text 2. I do not have extensive experience with Emacs. However, I've often heard it described as an infinitely extensible system, or as you put it "you can practically live in Emacs." I find that a bit odd, because it's like building an OS inside an OS. I already have an infinitely extensible system, namely my actual OS (*nix). I want a tool that nicely fits within that system, not supplants it. And then I want that tool to be the best possible tool at what it is (in this case, a code editor). If I need other operations/actions, then I will use other tools.

pilgrim689 14y ago
The problem with this argument is that the OS doesn't provide you with the mesh that integrates all these tools together under a consistent interface. That's what Emacs and Emacs Lisp provide. I can jump from code to documentation to org-mode (todos) to music player to git... and all the while I'm switching from tool to tool, the shortcuts are the same, the graphical interface is the same, and I never need to change windows. An Operating System doesn't give you that seamlessness... the seams are all too visible.
jasonm23 14y ago
Emacs was designed to work extremely well with Unix, or any other host operating system, and provide a way to easily gather tools (or fairly quickly replicate them in an os agnostic/portable manner) and provide a cohesive and expressive user interface to work with the output of those tools. You find Emacs "a bit odd" because it's necessary to put in about a week of diligent study in, that's the barrier to entry, STUDY. Other editors are just editors, that may or may not have extensions, Emacs is a textual environment. If you look at it from the perspective of games, It's kind of the difference between Pac Man and Minecraft.

pilgrim689 14y ago

The problem with this argument is that the OS doesn't provide you with the mesh that integrates all these tools together under a consistent interface. That's what Emacs and Emacs Lisp provide. I can jump from code to documentation to org-mode (todos) to music player to git... and all the while I'm switching from tool to tool, the shortcuts are the same, the graphical interface is the same, and I never need to change windows. An Operating System doesn't give you that seamlessness... the seams are all too visible.

jasonm23 14y ago

Emacs was designed to work extremely well with Unix, or any other host operating system, and provide a way to easily gather tools (or fairly quickly replicate them in an os agnostic/portable manner) and provide a cohesive and expressive user interface to work with the output of those tools. You find Emacs "a bit odd" because it's necessary to put in about a week of diligent study in, that's the barrier to entry, STUDY. Other editors are just editors, that may or may not have extensions, Emacs is a textual environment. If you look at it from the perspective of games, It's kind of the difference between Pac Man and Minecraft.