5 ms·

I tried Atom, and it was glacial. The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly rev'd about 8 years ago. It's a fine editor, but I'm starting to look f

by kabdib 13y ago

I tried Atom, and it was glacial. The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly rev'd about 8 years ago. It's a fine editor, but I'm starting to look for a replacement (and, oddly, I cannot stand where modern Emacs went). Sublime Text 2 is darned close. If only I could teach it proper bindings of C-U . . .

Timmmmbob 13y ago
Not really surprising - the whole idea of web desktop apps is kind of crazy, especially for something that you want to have good performance like a text editor.
gaigepr 13y ago
I'm curious what about modern emacs you don't like. Not to argue with you but truly out of curiosity.
- flyrain 13y ago
  So am I.
- kabdib 13y ago
  Many of the defaults are wrong. - Toolbars suck - Menus suck - Having Emacs suspend the shell I'm working in sucks - Getting names of files to actually appear as buffers, without extra gorp like a listener window that I don't care about at all is an exercise in frustration ... and more, but I need to find the last .emacs file that I spent half a day hacking up for details (and don't get me started on the geometry nonsense you need to control where Emacs starts up and how big its window is, and how well this plays with environments that have different monitor sizes and . . . oh bog, it can be better). Inevitably someone's going to argue about how Emacs should be used ("you're supposed to get into it and never leave" and similar nonsense), or point out that I can customize away the things I hate. True. But I've been using Emacs since 1979 or so, and it just seems much worse in the last ten years.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    I probably would've been inclined to argue about how Emacs "should" be used, but I'm not about to presume so with someone who's been using it for two years longer than I've been alive. If you're inclined to amplify on your perspective of how Emacs has changed over time, I'd be delighted to hear anything you have to say on the subject. It's so much more powerful than anything else I've ever used that I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase despite having used Emacs as my sole editor for almost a half decade now; I would value most highly the privilege of hearing from someone with a more experienced and balanced understanding, such as yours.
  - taeric 13y ago
    I'm not entirely sure I follow. Is it that toolbars and menubars themselves suck, or the particular ones in emacs? (fwiw, I have them disabled and don't feel like I'm missing much. Reenable them every now and then to explore the "promoted" options of modes.) I'm inclined to agree with the shell thing, though that is more of a property of the shell, isn't it? And you've lost me on the names of files. What do you mean? I certainly don't think you are using it wrong. I am extremely interested in how things have gotten worse. In particular, examples of how things were better would really help to understand. (And, no, you don't owe this to anyone. I would appreciate it, though.)
    - aaronem 13y ago
      FYI, you can access a buffer's menus, while menubars are disabled, with C-<mouse-3> on the buffer.
  - masklinn 13y ago
    > - Having Emacs suspend the shell I'm working in sucks Does emacsclient -n not work?
    - aaronem 13y ago
      Failing that, backgrounding the process at launch (by appending & to the invocation) should stop it blocking the shell from which it's launched. While I did mean what I said earlier about not feeling qualified to argue with someone who's been using Emacs since before I was even a gleam in my father's eye, I do want to point out that it's maybe sort of unfair to blame this one on Emacs; any process you launch from a shell, which doesn't immediately perform a detaching fork from its parent process (as most things don't), is going to have the same effect, and require the same modified invocation to prevent blocking your shell.
jussij 13y ago
> The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly FWIW the Zeus editor has an Epsilon keyboard mapping offer up by a Zeus user many years ago. But as I'm a Brief keyboard user myself, I'll have to be honest and say I don't know how accurate it is :( Also Zeus is shareware and is native to Windows, but several users have reported it does run on Linux using Wine. Jussi Jumppanen Author: Zeus IDE
billforsternz 13y ago
Pleased to read this comment. Reading Hacker News gives you the totally wrong impression that the text editor universe amounts to Emacs/Vim and Sublime/Textmate. There are a lot of other editors, many have a lot to recommend them. At least on Windows, Ultraedit for example seems a lot more polished and complete than Sublime.
albertzeyer 13y ago
Can you elaborate on why you think it is glacial or what you mean by that? Is it too slow as your child comments suggest because of the used web technics? Or are you missing important features? Couldn't they be added as plugins? Maybe such plugins were already made. Or is it the overall design? What's bad about it?
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  I open a folder using Sublime and it loads instantly. I open the same folder using Atom and it takes about 5 seconds to open.

by kabdib 13y ago

Timmmmbob 13y ago

Not really surprising - the whole idea of web desktop apps is kind of crazy, especially for something that you want to have good performance like a text editor.

gaigepr 13y ago

I'm curious what about modern emacs you don't like. Not to argue with you but truly out of curiosity.

flyrain 13y ago
So am I.
kabdib 13y ago
Many of the defaults are wrong. - Toolbars suck - Menus suck - Having Emacs suspend the shell I'm working in sucks - Getting names of files to actually appear as buffers, without extra gorp like a listener window that I don't care about at all is an exercise in frustration ... and more, but I need to find the last .emacs file that I spent half a day hacking up for details (and don't get me started on the geometry nonsense you need to control where Emacs starts up and how big its window is, and how well this plays with environments that have different monitor sizes and . . . oh bog, it can be better). Inevitably someone's going to argue about how Emacs should be used ("you're supposed to get into it and never leave" and similar nonsense), or point out that I can customize away the things I hate. True. But I've been using Emacs since 1979 or so, and it just seems much worse in the last ten years.
- aaronem 13y ago
  I probably would've been inclined to argue about how Emacs "should" be used, but I'm not about to presume so with someone who's been using it for two years longer than I've been alive. If you're inclined to amplify on your perspective of how Emacs has changed over time, I'd be delighted to hear anything you have to say on the subject. It's so much more powerful than anything else I've ever used that I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase despite having used Emacs as my sole editor for almost a half decade now; I would value most highly the privilege of hearing from someone with a more experienced and balanced understanding, such as yours.
- taeric 13y ago
  I'm not entirely sure I follow. Is it that toolbars and menubars themselves suck, or the particular ones in emacs? (fwiw, I have them disabled and don't feel like I'm missing much. Reenable them every now and then to explore the "promoted" options of modes.) I'm inclined to agree with the shell thing, though that is more of a property of the shell, isn't it? And you've lost me on the names of files. What do you mean? I certainly don't think you are using it wrong. I am extremely interested in how things have gotten worse. In particular, examples of how things were better would really help to understand. (And, no, you don't owe this to anyone. I would appreciate it, though.)
  - aaronem 13y ago
    FYI, you can access a buffer's menus, while menubars are disabled, with C-<mouse-3> on the buffer.
- masklinn 13y ago
  > - Having Emacs suspend the shell I'm working in sucks Does emacsclient -n not work?
  - aaronem 13y ago
    Failing that, backgrounding the process at launch (by appending & to the invocation) should stop it blocking the shell from which it's launched. While I did mean what I said earlier about not feeling qualified to argue with someone who's been using Emacs since before I was even a gleam in my father's eye, I do want to point out that it's maybe sort of unfair to blame this one on Emacs; any process you launch from a shell, which doesn't immediately perform a detaching fork from its parent process (as most things don't), is going to have the same effect, and require the same modified invocation to prevent blocking your shell.

jussij 13y ago

> The editor I use now (Epsilon) was last significantly FWIW the Zeus editor has an Epsilon keyboard mapping offer up by a Zeus user many years ago. But as I'm a Brief keyboard user myself, I'll have to be honest and say I don't know how accurate it is :( Also Zeus is shareware and is native to Windows, but several users have reported it does run on Linux using Wine. Jussi Jumppanen Author: Zeus IDE

billforsternz 13y ago

Pleased to read this comment. Reading Hacker News gives you the totally wrong impression that the text editor universe amounts to Emacs/Vim and Sublime/Textmate. There are a lot of other editors, many have a lot to recommend them. At least on Windows, Ultraedit for example seems a lot more polished and complete than Sublime.

albertzeyer 13y ago

Can you elaborate on why you think it is glacial or what you mean by that? Is it too slow as your child comments suggest because of the used web technics? Or are you missing important features? Couldn't they be added as plugins? Maybe such plugins were already made. Or is it the overall design? What's bad about it?

sergiotapia 13y ago
I open a folder using Sublime and it loads instantly. I open the same folder using Atom and it takes about 5 seconds to open.