On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Christopher Howard wrote:
> I've heard the quote before, "Emacs is a great OS, but lacks a good
> editor..." That's c--p. Emacs is a great OS AND a great editor!
Everyone's entitled to their own subjective reality. Emacs just felt...
ponderous to me.
> I can fly editing circles around everyone I know who uses Vim. Can do
> stuff in seconds with macros, shortcuts, and functions that takes them
> two or three minutes of laborious typing. And if I forget how to do
> anything, I'm usually only takes me about 30 seconds to find out how to
> do it via the built in reference manual. And I like the fact that I can
> customize just about any behavior through the customize variable interface.
You might consider that perhaps everyone you know isn't a power user. Sure,
I know a ton of people who can *use* vi/vim. But the number who are really
good with it are in the vast minority. I'd wager that for many common,
repetitive tasks it can be done in vi than emacs in fewer keystrokes. I've
known some emac'ers that can keep pace, but that's usually with some level
of customizations, not out of the box.
To be fair, vim is extremely customizable, and I've taken advantage of that
to speed up my common coding tasks (running through lint/taint checks,
calling up perldoc references for functions/modules, applying code
formatting rules, etc., etc.). But, there's nothing you've stated above
that vim doesn't have.
> On the OS side... Emacs is pretty cool. I pretty much live in it now.
> who needs terminals and file navigators when you have shell shortcuts,
> eshell, dired, tramp, buffers, windows, and frames? I can do git vcs
> within emacs, and Haskell mode in Emacs is beautiful, especially with
> Haskell unicode symbol replacement, plus compiler and interpreter load
> shortcuts, and TAGS support.
Ah, sounds like the Windows and/or systemd disease, which is 180 degrees
from UNIX philosophy. While some people have coded mail, file browsers, and
other lunacy in vim as well, I just want my editor to be what it should be:
and editor. Do one thing, and do it damned well. Not everything, much of
which is half-assed.
> I used to knock Emacs for using Lisp for extensibility. Now that I'm a
> functional programmer, I have precisely the opposite opinion. I still
> have quite a ways to go yet to finish the Emacs Lisp tutorial (C-h r u m
> Elisp) but it has been fun so far.
>
> Anyway, if somebody who is reading this is still trying to pick an
> editor, just open Emacs up sometime, type C-h r, and read through the
> manual to see all the cool stuff you can do with it.
On one hand it's really great that you're learning the depths of your
preferred tool. On the other, you're crippling yourself if you ever intend
to be efficiently productive in as many environments as possible. Vi is
always guaranteed to be on every POSIX-compliant UNIX out there. Emacs is
almost like finding a unicorn these days. Go into a large scale enterprise
server environment and you'll be hard pressed to find it. *Especially* if
it's a heterogenous UNIX environment.
That's not to say that it doesn't/can't happen, but if someone ever
suggested it should be part of a standard core OS deployment, man, my brain
would short circuit. That's like expecting X-Windows to be on a production
server. Freaking crazy. I'm not loading up a gargantuan demi-OS to edit
one line in freaking /etc/hosts.allow or what have you...
--Arthur Corliss
Live Free or Die
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Received on Wed Apr 17 23:19:58 2013
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