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It's slightly ironic that BBEdit is dismissed as "lost in the pre-OS X" world by someone who went on to evaluate emacs and plumped for Vim•. Especially since BB

by bonaldi 17y ago

It's slightly ironic that BBEdit is dismissed as "lost in the pre-OS X" world by someone who went on to evaluate emacs and plumped for Vim•. Especially since BBEdit solves all the problems he had with TextMate. (• This isn't a diss of Vim or Emacs, btw, just that they're both rather less "OS X era" than either BBEdit or Textmate -- but that's often a strength)

lallysingh 17y ago
Indeed; outside of emacs, it's my favorite editor. It is (IMHO) exactly how a GUI-based text editor should act. Simple and unintrusive in normal use, with enough power under the hood (and accessible via UI) to do the tougher stuff. I still miss some of the things I could do easily in it, even with emacs 23. As for the article's comments on emacs, the mistake is in assuming emacs is an application. It's not. It's a lisp environment that's been shaped for text editing. The configuration interface is terrible because you're not really supposed to use it. Instead, you shove programmatic commands into .emacs to bend it to your will. Friends and I brag about the length, complexity, and age of our .emacs files... maybe we should get out more... but you get the idea.
- pyre 17y ago
  Even configuring Emacs through the .emacs file I find that it treats things different enough from Vim that it's painful to try and switch. Every once in a while I get excited that maybe I'll switch, but then I pretty quickly fall back to Vim. There are so many things in Vim that 'just make sense', at least to my way of thinking. Things like tabs. Why is it that in Emacs you can't just define a soft tabstop of 4 spaces? Why do I have to define a list of column numbers? Don't get me wrong, the idea that I could manually define a bunch of column numbers so that the tabstops were uneven for a particular application would is cool... by why can't I just say "every 4th column is a tabstop" and have Emacs apply that until infinity columns? And there is the lack of things like Vim's ":set list" mode to quickly visualize if a bunch of spacing consists of tabs, spaces or a mixture (and to quickly figure out where trailing whitespaces are). These are all things that I can get on default Vim without any configuration. I'm sure these are all programmable in Emacs -- it is a full-on lisp engine afterall -- but it's too steep of a climb for me (or at least has been thus far) when I'm already productive with Vim.
  - lallysingh 17y ago
    (assuming cc-mode) Set c-basic-offset to 4. Even better, if you don't like the way anything's indented, move the cursor to that spot and hit C-c C-o and it'll tell you why it's indented that line that way, and you can adjust those parts as you wish. If you're not in cc-mode, then.. it's lisp. Repeating sequences of multiples of 4 are pretty easy to write in a function that generates them.
    - pyre 17y ago
      Not being a huge lisp person, are there lazy-evaluating lists in lisp? So that I could define the tabstop sequence to be a list that would continually be evaluated, but only as far as the calling function was asking for (like Haskell)? Otherwise, there is still a finite end to the list even if I can easily generate a ridiculously long sequence automatically.
      - lallysingh 17y ago
        Nope, strict eval only. Just define a max, and if you hit it, raise it.
      - ekiru 17y ago
        I don't believe there's anything in the Common Lisp standard for it, but I think lazy lists should be implementable with macros.

by bonaldi 17y ago

lallysingh 17y ago

Indeed; outside of emacs, it's my favorite editor. It is (IMHO) exactly how a GUI-based text editor should act. Simple and unintrusive in normal use, with enough power under the hood (and accessible via UI) to do the tougher stuff. I still miss some of the things I could do easily in it, even with emacs 23. As for the article's comments on emacs, the mistake is in assuming emacs is an application. It's not. It's a lisp environment that's been shaped for text editing. The configuration interface is terrible because you're not really supposed to use it. Instead, you shove programmatic commands into .emacs to bend it to your will. Friends and I brag about the length, complexity, and age of our .emacs files... maybe we should get out more... but you get the idea.

pyre 17y ago
Even configuring Emacs through the .emacs file I find that it treats things different enough from Vim that it's painful to try and switch. Every once in a while I get excited that maybe I'll switch, but then I pretty quickly fall back to Vim. There are so many things in Vim that 'just make sense', at least to my way of thinking. Things like tabs. Why is it that in Emacs you can't just define a soft tabstop of 4 spaces? Why do I have to define a list of column numbers? Don't get me wrong, the idea that I could manually define a bunch of column numbers so that the tabstops were uneven for a particular application would is cool... by why can't I just say "every 4th column is a tabstop" and have Emacs apply that until infinity columns? And there is the lack of things like Vim's ":set list" mode to quickly visualize if a bunch of spacing consists of tabs, spaces or a mixture (and to quickly figure out where trailing whitespaces are). These are all things that I can get on default Vim without any configuration. I'm sure these are all programmable in Emacs -- it is a full-on lisp engine afterall -- but it's too steep of a climb for me (or at least has been thus far) when I'm already productive with Vim.
- lallysingh 17y ago
  (assuming cc-mode) Set c-basic-offset to 4. Even better, if you don't like the way anything's indented, move the cursor to that spot and hit C-c C-o and it'll tell you why it's indented that line that way, and you can adjust those parts as you wish. If you're not in cc-mode, then.. it's lisp. Repeating sequences of multiples of 4 are pretty easy to write in a function that generates them.
  - pyre 17y ago
    Not being a huge lisp person, are there lazy-evaluating lists in lisp? So that I could define the tabstop sequence to be a list that would continually be evaluated, but only as far as the calling function was asking for (like Haskell)? Otherwise, there is still a finite end to the list even if I can easily generate a ridiculously long sequence automatically.
    - lallysingh 17y ago
      Nope, strict eval only. Just define a max, and if you hit it, raise it.
    - ekiru 17y ago
      I don't believe there's anything in the Common Lisp standard for it, but I think lazy lists should be implementable with macros.