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It's kind of interesting to take an approach like this and contrast it with the user experience of something like Vim or Emacs. These editors are extremely popu

by Permit 12y ago

It's kind of interesting to take an approach like this and contrast it with the user experience of something like Vim or Emacs. These editors are extremely popular despite not making it easy for first time users. Is this because the target demographic of Vim/Emacs are all power users? It seems like making powerful tools like these are at odds with treating the user like they're drunk.

golergka 12y ago
It's all about the point at the end of the video — the amount of attention and effort the user wants to give to your app. If it's a usual consumer app, the potential user obviously has a lot less attention to give to it then you, the creator; to feel this, you really should imagine that the user is actually drunk. But for a professional app, like vim or emacs, it doesn't apply. I switched from Sublime to vim this february, and it was a real effort, but I knew why I'm doing this, and I was willing to put this effort in. And it wasn't my first attempt either; I tried using emacs a year ago, but it still was to much of an effort and I had too much work to complete, so I dropped it.
gravity13 12y ago
I've been thinking about this for a while and my current thought on it is that authoring UIs are fundamentally different than task-oriented UIs, as they are premised more on giving the user expressivity and power of creation. The same might be said of a UI like Photoshop- complex, need to learn how to use it, can do shit with it.
xixixao 12y ago
I beg to differ! These editors are extremely popular because of lack of better alternatives and because of the great conservatism (it doesn't matter that there might be something better, I have already mastered this one tool). I give you Sublime Text as an example - it has exploded in popularity simply for its great user interface. A lot of the engineers I have met, that used Emacs or Vim, have either never heard of Sublime or never tried it. If they were curious enough to give me 30 seconds of their attention, they all agreed "this thing might come in useful". Some I have converted. The same thing is true for Word, Excel, for that matter Windows, Photoshop. These are not the best user interfaces for the main bulk of their target market - they are simply dominating because of lack of better alternatives and/or the great conservatism. My point is, just because you target power users, your software should not get away with a poor interface. As another example, look at the crippled tool we use every day - the shell (csh, bash) and compare it with something like fish (that is far from ideal but makes at least a bit of progress). The video is the best thing I have seen on HN in long while.
- aychedee 12y ago
  If you know how to use vim properly Sublime just feels clunky. I'll switch to another editor with composable commands that provides a better interface, but that's certainly not sublime.
ggreer 12y ago
Vim and Emacs are not as popular as you might think. They come installed by default on most unix systems, but millions of developers go out of their way to install (and pay for) Sublime Text or Notepad++. And those are dwarfed by Visual Studio and the IntelliJ-based IDEs (RubyMine, PhpStorm, WebStorm, PyCharm, Android Studio, etc). Most of these editors are closed-source, cost money, and aren't installed by default. Yet Vim and Emacs are so hard to use that they end up being a fraction of the paid editors' user-bases. Who am I to claim knowledge of editor usage? Well at Floobits[1] we've made plugins for Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, and IntelliJ. We can see how many people download and use each one. Sublime Text and IntelliJ are by far the most popular editors. It could be that Emacs and Vim users really don't like to collaborate, but it seems more likely that simply fewer people use them. I'm not trying to hate on Vim and Emacs. Once people do learn them (and heavily customize them with plugins), they are very productive. And Vim and Emacs aren't going anywhere. A developer can learn one of them and use it for a lifetime. But Vim and Emacs could be much more popular if they put some effort into improving the first-time experience. 1. https://floobits.com/ https://floobits.com/
- jakejake 12y ago
  I feel like there is this vibe out there that if you don't use emacs then you're some kind of inferior developer who has to rely on tools to do his/her work. That perpetuates a myth that everybody of significance is using it. I don't buy it either. Just antidotally I've only run into one or two developers who use emacs or vim as their primary code editor. A lot of people like myself, though are proficient with one or another shell editor (Vim in my case) that they use when working directly on a server, or for certain, occasional things where it's more convenient.
  - quanticle 12y ago
    I think we, as developers, go out of our way to perpetuate that myth. How many times have you heard an experienced developer sneer at a newbie because they're using Notepad or gEdit? I think that there is definitely a tendency amongst developers to venerate tools and forget that tools are great only insofar as they allow you to be more productive. When I'm using software, I care that it's correct, that its user interface is understandable, that it's secure, extensible and performant. Approximately none of those things have a correlation with the editor or IDE used to write the tool.
kps 12y ago
The video does mention this, in passing: One of the beautiful things about great UI is that it's not there. [....] It's like a guitar player who just lets the music come out and they're not really sure if the guitar's there any more. It takes sustained time and effort to learn to play guitar, or to learn to touch-type, or to program, or to manipulate programs in a code editor. This is a completely different use case from that of a casual web site user. You don't hand a musician a 5 inch screen with a big blue button and expect them to play it like a guitar.
shirro 12y ago
vim is all muscle memory. You don't need to read any menus or icons. It is perfect for drunk coding with blurry vision. It just isn't ideal for casual use. This is the real difference. Most web interfaces need to be immediately usable by a casual user to sell products or ad views. Expert interfaces can be as complex as you like as long as they reward learning time with productivity improvements. If you are going to be spending the rest of your career writing text, spending hundreds of hours learning a powerful tool is time well spent. Not that vim is that tool for everyone but most programming editors will have a learning curve which is beyond anything a casual user would attempt.
Houshalter 12y ago
Are they extremely popular? Or are the users just more vocal about it? I went through the whole emacs tutorial and still have no idea what I'm doing. It's very difficult and counter-intuitive. On the other hand notepad++ does everything I need it to do and works right out of the box. I definitely think emacs is cooler and has more features, but you can guess which one I use day to day.

by Permit 12y ago

golergka 12y ago

It's all about the point at the end of the video — the amount of attention and effort the user wants to give to your app. If it's a usual consumer app, the potential user obviously has a lot less attention to give to it then you, the creator; to feel this, you really should imagine that the user is actually drunk. But for a professional app, like vim or emacs, it doesn't apply. I switched from Sublime to vim this february, and it was a real effort, but I knew why I'm doing this, and I was willing to put this effort in. And it wasn't my first attempt either; I tried using emacs a year ago, but it still was to much of an effort and I had too much work to complete, so I dropped it.

gravity13 12y ago

I've been thinking about this for a while and my current thought on it is that authoring UIs are fundamentally different than task-oriented UIs, as they are premised more on giving the user expressivity and power of creation. The same might be said of a UI like Photoshop- complex, need to learn how to use it, can do shit with it.

xixixao 12y ago

I beg to differ! These editors are extremely popular because of lack of better alternatives and because of the great conservatism (it doesn't matter that there might be something better, I have already mastered this one tool). I give you Sublime Text as an example - it has exploded in popularity simply for its great user interface. A lot of the engineers I have met, that used Emacs or Vim, have either never heard of Sublime or never tried it. If they were curious enough to give me 30 seconds of their attention, they all agreed "this thing might come in useful". Some I have converted. The same thing is true for Word, Excel, for that matter Windows, Photoshop. These are not the best user interfaces for the main bulk of their target market - they are simply dominating because of lack of better alternatives and/or the great conservatism. My point is, just because you target power users, your software should not get away with a poor interface. As another example, look at the crippled tool we use every day - the shell (csh, bash) and compare it with something like fish (that is far from ideal but makes at least a bit of progress). The video is the best thing I have seen on HN in long while.

aychedee 12y ago
If you know how to use vim properly Sublime just feels clunky. I'll switch to another editor with composable commands that provides a better interface, but that's certainly not sublime.

ggreer 12y ago

Vim and Emacs are not as popular as you might think. They come installed by default on most unix systems, but millions of developers go out of their way to install (and pay for) Sublime Text or Notepad++. And those are dwarfed by Visual Studio and the IntelliJ-based IDEs (RubyMine, PhpStorm, WebStorm, PyCharm, Android Studio, etc). Most of these editors are closed-source, cost money, and aren't installed by default. Yet Vim and Emacs are so hard to use that they end up being a fraction of the paid editors' user-bases. Who am I to claim knowledge of editor usage? Well at Floobits[1] we've made plugins for Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, and IntelliJ. We can see how many people download and use each one. Sublime Text and IntelliJ are by far the most popular editors. It could be that Emacs and Vim users really don't like to collaborate, but it seems more likely that simply fewer people use them. I'm not trying to hate on Vim and Emacs. Once people do learn them (and heavily customize them with plugins), they are very productive. And Vim and Emacs aren't going anywhere. A developer can learn one of them and use it for a lifetime. But Vim and Emacs could be much more popular if they put some effort into improving the first-time experience. 1. https://floobits.com/ https://floobits.com/

jakejake 12y ago
I feel like there is this vibe out there that if you don't use emacs then you're some kind of inferior developer who has to rely on tools to do his/her work. That perpetuates a myth that everybody of significance is using it. I don't buy it either. Just antidotally I've only run into one or two developers who use emacs or vim as their primary code editor. A lot of people like myself, though are proficient with one or another shell editor (Vim in my case) that they use when working directly on a server, or for certain, occasional things where it's more convenient.
- quanticle 12y ago
  I think we, as developers, go out of our way to perpetuate that myth. How many times have you heard an experienced developer sneer at a newbie because they're using Notepad or gEdit? I think that there is definitely a tendency amongst developers to venerate tools and forget that tools are great only insofar as they allow you to be more productive. When I'm using software, I care that it's correct, that its user interface is understandable, that it's secure, extensible and performant. Approximately none of those things have a correlation with the editor or IDE used to write the tool.

kps 12y ago

The video does mention this, in passing: One of the beautiful things about great UI is that it's not there. [....] It's like a guitar player who just lets the music come out and they're not really sure if the guitar's there any more. It takes sustained time and effort to learn to play guitar, or to learn to touch-type, or to program, or to manipulate programs in a code editor. This is a completely different use case from that of a casual web site user. You don't hand a musician a 5 inch screen with a big blue button and expect them to play it like a guitar.

shirro 12y ago

vim is all muscle memory. You don't need to read any menus or icons. It is perfect for drunk coding with blurry vision. It just isn't ideal for casual use. This is the real difference. Most web interfaces need to be immediately usable by a casual user to sell products or ad views. Expert interfaces can be as complex as you like as long as they reward learning time with productivity improvements. If you are going to be spending the rest of your career writing text, spending hundreds of hours learning a powerful tool is time well spent. Not that vim is that tool for everyone but most programming editors will have a learning curve which is beyond anything a casual user would attempt.

Houshalter 12y ago

Are they extremely popular? Or are the users just more vocal about it? I went through the whole emacs tutorial and still have no idea what I'm doing. It's very difficult and counter-intuitive. On the other hand notepad++ does everything I need it to do and works right out of the box. I definitely think emacs is cooler and has more features, but you can guess which one I use day to day.