So I like fiddling around with my text editors.
I’ve been mostly using vim for my editing needs for several months and I’ve grown semi-efficient with it.
I definitely prefer modal editing to non-modal editing, but emacs as a platform is definitely superior. I have tried evil-mode and spacemacs, and they are really nice. However, whenever I have any problems, I’m not comfortable enough with emacs to fix it; googling it will give me hack that may or may not work and that I don’t really understand.
To rectify this, I’ve decided to start learning emacs from scratch, starting with no plugins.
Does anybody on this forum use vim or emacs? Even if you don’t, do you have an editor that you really like? (Atom? Sublime text? Anything else?)
For quick fixes on system files and scripts I usually use vi. I’ve used emacs in the past to fix corrupted directory files. It’s good for working on non-text files, otherwise I don’t care for it all that much. For most everyday use I use the kde text editor. I use libreoffice for docs. I used to use nedit but getting it to run on suse became a pain. Too many unresolved dependencies.
Yeah, emacs isn’t really worth it unless you actually dedicate enough time to learn how to use it effectively, which I plan on doing. From my experiences in vim, getting comfortable with a powerful editor isn’t too difficult, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run, and it’s fun too IMO.
I actually haven’t tried nedit; looks kinda interesting.
I’ve always preferred vim, but as a Mac User for over a decade, I doubt I’ll ever really get over TextMate. It’s my favorite programming editor hands down on ANY OS, ever.
I’ve used Sublime a little bit, which I believe is similar to TM (i’m on windows, so not TM for me).
I actually agree with you on preferring vim over emacs, at least in terms of the editing style (the modal editing is much faster IMO), but as a platform, emacs seems far superior (emacs lisp is definitely better than vimscript). There is a really good vim plugin for emacs, so you can have the best of both worlds.
I don’t understand something, and maybe you can help me: why do you prefer Textmate over vim when most of the time you can get a vim plugin for any feature in Textmate?
I don’t think vim lacks any functionality that TM has (allowing plugins, of course), and the convenience of a feature can always be increased by adding extra keybindings.
The answers that I would expect are that TM looks better, and/or you don’t actually like using the keyboard to navigate text instead of the mouse.
Well, I don’t typically use the mouse too much in TextMate, I use a lot of the keyboard navigation functions (a lot of which are actually taken from emacs…the guy that created TextMate was a big emacs fan, and basically wanted to give a nicer GUI to some of the features of emacs).
The simplest answer is that I started (more or less) with TextMate, and it’s very familiar to me. Vim certainly has more editing power (at least I’m fairly sure it does), but I find that TextMate’s team trigger functionally is very handy for me, and I like the easy way of changing settings (for which I do use the mouse). Also, the fact that TM uses Ruby as its scripting language is fantastic, as Ruby is my personal favorite programming language.
And yeah, I’ve never used Vimscript much, but just about any kind of Lisp is going to be better than pretty well any other language.
And I’ve heard good things about Sublime, on both platforms, but I’ve never personally used it, so I can’t say either way about it…it’s one of those things I’ve always meant to try, and have never gotten around to.
Amen, brother. I’m into lisp right now, specifically clojure. Just so you know, Vimscript is the worst programming language ever (besides all those esoteric languages, of course). Emacs lisp is a lisp, so it’s already got something going for it, but it’s not the greatest of lisps, which is a bummer. I personally haven’t done enough programming in it to be annoyed at it, but I’ve read others’ opinions about it.
Right now I’m pursuing the idea that everything should be done with the keyboard, but I respect gui users. I may change my ideals at some point though, and switch to touch-based editing if that ever happens.
I’m a computer engineering student so this is right up my alley. I use Atom for most of my notes and schoolwork if I can. Unfortunately, dealing with some hardware often gets me roped into using specific vendor’s IDE’s. If I am typing my notes, they all get put into notes folder within my class folder and saved as simple text files. Searching for a specific piece of information is really easy then with grep. I’ll use Kate sometimes for really quick things, but never for anything that will take much time. I don’t use vim all that much on my personal machine, but when I’m using SSH it’s my text editor of choice.
^ I like atom a lot, but it crashes far too much for me (well, to be fair, it’s probably the plugins I use, but it’s annoying nonetheless). What plugins do you use?
Hmmm, do you realize how similar Atom is to Emacs? Both emphasize extreme extensibility, both come with non-modal key-bindings, and both have plugins to make them modal.
The reason I like emacs over atom is that whenever I’ve tried a plugin for it, I’ve nearly always had a great experience. These are mostly REPL plugins, which vim really can’t do, and Atom plugins always (and I mean always) stink at.
One thing positive about Atom is that it has a nicer gui. Even this is partly bad too though; emacs has a nice property that nearly everything is a buffer, so you can use all your text editing/navigating tricks you’ve learned on it; with atom, a file tree viewer, for example, is an html element that can’t be navigated with the same keybindings you use to navigate text. If you have a vim plugin, you would want to use j and k to navigate your files, but you can’t, you have to use a mouse.
All that said, I actually do like Atom a lot; there are just a few flaws that put me off.
Have you checked out Visual Studio Code(not Visual Studio, mind you, Visual Studio Code; bad name, I know)? It’s pretty similar to Atom, but it seems a lot snappier.
I’m going to be starting college this fall for Computer Science, so I’m kind of in a similar boat as you.
Hey, now, some of the esoteric languages are interesting in design, at least. I mean, I’d hate to try to write even a trivial program in Brainfuck, but it’s Turing complete, right? XD
I’ve not used Clojure really at all, to be honest. My favorite Lisp is probably either Racket (which is technically a Scheme) or Common Lisp. If you like functional stuff, check out Haskell. It’s awesome.
back in the day when programming language names were all caps.
@Metalboy yeah, I’ve enjoyed looking at some of them. Whitespace is a gem.
I actually am into functional programming, and I agree that Haskell is awesome. I actually have gone a step further than Haskell into the world of proof assistents and dependent types (Coq and Idris); I’m doing clojure right now because I’m working on extensibility stuff and static types make that nearly impossible (or at least very clunky), but I eventually want to get back into fun type stuff.
The thing about clojure is that it’s actually going somewhere. Not only does it have great tooling (which is actually one thing that drew me to emacs, although vim has a pretty good clojure mode too), but it also runs everywhere (Java runs in most places, but Clojure also has ClojureScript, which is a JavaScript backend, and JavaScript runs literally everywhere).
Rich Hickey seems to know what he is doing in language design.
Are you serious? I’m amazed; maybe the windows version is buggier.
How so? I’m talking about extensibility only; they don’t agree on a lot of stuff, but in extensibility and plugins, they seem pretty similar to me.
I meant you can’t use they same keybindings that you use to navigate text. While a file tree isn’t text to be sure, it contains a lot of text, and it’s arranged in a somewhat similar way. If I have a vim plugin installed, I’d like to use j and k to move up and down the file tree, but I can’t. Sure there are keybindings for everything, but the experience isn’t as rich. There is a quote “I’d rather have 100 functions for working with 1 data structure than 10 functions for 10 different data structures.” It’s kind of the same here: I’d rather have 100 keybindings for working with text than 10 keybindings for text, 10 for my file tree, 10 for tabs, 10 for my this, 10 for that, etc… The point is that if you should learn one thing really well, and everything should be a version of that thing.
You’re one of those; I’ll leave you alone I guess. I was suggesting Code because it has been really stable for me, but if you haven’t had any trouble with Atom, there isn’t a whole lot or reasons to switch (although the integrated debugger is nice).
Lol, well, they both have to do with computers. I don’t have too specific of an idea what CE is, but I think it has several classes in common with CS. Am I right?
Most assuredly, Vi and Emacs are among the finest text editors available. Whenever I am in a hurry - say to catch a Steamship to the continent; or perhaps taking in a show at the Bijou. I crank-up my favorite tty-terminal attached to my trusty PDP-11 and start doing some “word-processing”.
Quite satisfying indeed.
… Kidding! I used to be a Wizard with Vi on my Sun 3/50 back in the day.
You’re one of those; I’ll leave you alone I guess. I was suggesting Code because it has been really stable for me, but if you haven’t had any trouble with Atom, there isn’t a whole lot or reasons to switch (although the integrated debugger is nice).