6 ms·

in terms of text editors on Mac, nothing else is really that close emacs

by 1gor 17y ago

dasil003 17y ago
All text editors are subsets of emacs... that doesn't make emacs more usable or productive though.
- davidw 17y ago
  Emacs is extremely "productive" in the hands of a capable user. A "hacker", let's call him or her. "Usable"? Well, not in the hands of a beginner. If you want to just click a few things, Emacs is not for you. If, on the other hand, you live in your text editor all day long (you are, say, a programmer), what Emacs lacks in usability it makes up for 1000 times over in extensibility, flexibility, and ability to do pretty much anything you could imagine, with a bit of effort.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    I didn't say it wasn't productive. I said "more productive". The difference is setup overhead. If you discount the effort to get your environment dialed-in, then of course emacs will be the best choice. On the other hand I encourage you to consider that Emacs Lisp may not in fact be the best tool for all jobs. I'm not sure why you put "productivity" and "usability" in quotes, or why you mention "beginners" and "want to just click a few things". We're talking about programmer tools here, so suggesting that a non-programmer couldn't use emacs is not really apropos.
    - davidw 17y ago
      Emacs is forever. In other words, 'dialed in' is a continuous process, which will keep happening no matter what language or environment is popular today.
j_baker 17y ago
I don't see that many textmate users dropping it for emacs any time in the near future. Yes, textmate was inspired by emacs, but it tends to appeal to a different crowd.
- jrockway 17y ago
  but it tends to appeal to a different crowd. People that know how to read?
- undees 17y ago
  I did. It was actually TextMate that got me back into Emacs after all these years. I needed something at work on my not-a-Mac that was as good as TM. e and InType were close, but fell into the (sorry in advance for the cliche) uncanny valley, where any minor shortcoming relative to TM was doubly unsettling. It was actually easier to adjust to Emacs than to the also-rans.
- avinashv 17y ago
  Not emacs, but I dropped TextMate for Vim, and was very, very happy to do so. The stagnated development, the closed source and lack of portability, the annoying bugs etc. made it an easy choice.
ynniv 17y ago
The more I try using TextMate, the more I find myself using Aquamacs. There are some things that TM is clearly better at, but there are a lot of immature features: - find in project is slow - window and buffer management - editing via SFTP (tho Aquamacs has horrible lag for me) - syntax highlighting crashes on really long lines and files - too many keyboard shortcuts... I often hit the wrong key and have it add a random code snippet to my JavaScript file (yes, this is probably configurable, but I expect good defaults from commercial apps)

in terms of text editors on Mac, nothing else is really that close emacs

by 1gor 17y ago

in terms of text editors on Mac, nothing else is really that close emacs

dasil003 17y ago

All text editors are subsets of emacs... that doesn't make emacs more usable or productive though.

davidw 17y ago
Emacs is extremely "productive" in the hands of a capable user. A "hacker", let's call him or her. "Usable"? Well, not in the hands of a beginner. If you want to just click a few things, Emacs is not for you. If, on the other hand, you live in your text editor all day long (you are, say, a programmer), what Emacs lacks in usability it makes up for 1000 times over in extensibility, flexibility, and ability to do pretty much anything you could imagine, with a bit of effort.
- dasil003 17y ago
  I didn't say it wasn't productive. I said "more productive". The difference is setup overhead. If you discount the effort to get your environment dialed-in, then of course emacs will be the best choice. On the other hand I encourage you to consider that Emacs Lisp may not in fact be the best tool for all jobs. I'm not sure why you put "productivity" and "usability" in quotes, or why you mention "beginners" and "want to just click a few things". We're talking about programmer tools here, so suggesting that a non-programmer couldn't use emacs is not really apropos.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Emacs is forever. In other words, 'dialed in' is a continuous process, which will keep happening no matter what language or environment is popular today.

j_baker 17y ago

I don't see that many textmate users dropping it for emacs any time in the near future. Yes, textmate was inspired by emacs, but it tends to appeal to a different crowd.

jrockway 17y ago
but it tends to appeal to a different crowd. People that know how to read?
undees 17y ago
I did. It was actually TextMate that got me back into Emacs after all these years. I needed something at work on my not-a-Mac that was as good as TM. e and InType were close, but fell into the (sorry in advance for the cliche) uncanny valley, where any minor shortcoming relative to TM was doubly unsettling. It was actually easier to adjust to Emacs than to the also-rans.
avinashv 17y ago
Not emacs, but I dropped TextMate for Vim, and was very, very happy to do so. The stagnated development, the closed source and lack of portability, the annoying bugs etc. made it an easy choice.

ynniv 17y ago

The more I try using TextMate, the more I find myself using Aquamacs. There are some things that TM is clearly better at, but there are a lot of immature features: - find in project is slow - window and buffer management - editing via SFTP (tho Aquamacs has horrible lag for me) - syntax highlighting crashes on really long lines and files - too many keyboard shortcuts... I often hit the wrong key and have it add a random code snippet to my JavaScript file (yes, this is probably configurable, but I expect good defaults from commercial apps)