Emacs
(ducks)
Emacs
It’s a sound choice. I don’t like to use it, personally, because I want to use something that uses same motions and syntax as editors on servers that I don’t own (ex. customers). And, I’m not a fan of Lisp. It’s a great and (self-)extensible text editor/lisp interpreter, though.
I use vi from an Emacs Shell, which was spawned from an Emacs GUI.
Emacs is what the unified linux desktop should be
EMACS. It’s the superior text editor.
I’d say it’s a superior text editor.
It’s a text editor?
I suppose I tend to think of it more as a Lisp interpreter that’s capable of self-extension.
I dislike Evil, and would never recommend it to anyone looking for a modal editing solution for Emacs. I would rather break my pinky with the modifiers than use Evil.
- Evil is SLOOWWW: its startup time is 10x longer than other modal editing packages.
- It has high cost of integration with other packages; editing-related packages rarely play well with Evil unless specifically designed for it.
- We can do better than vi. Nowadays, there are some more modern alternatives to vi, like Kakoune that fix some of the fundamental problems with vi. One such problem is the fact that you cannot know what you are acting on until after the command completes: Kakoune solves this by having a unique
noun verbsyntax rather than vi’sverb nounsyntax. This means that you get constant feedback about what you’re acting on before you act on it, since objects are always highlighted.
Instead, for anyone looking for a serious and actually good modal editing, I would suggest them to try out meow. It fixes all of the problems I mentioned above, and makes more improvements to the
viexperience that I didn’t mention.
Is no one gonna talk about neovim or are we all just like set the alias and forgot that we are inside neovim and not vim or vi
What makes 6 so popular?
Because vii viii ix
LXIX my balls! Haha got’em.
Believe it or not, this is the second time I got to make that joke within an hour.
* laughs in Latin *
The comments on this post went exactly like they have over the past 20 years, with one exception.
Emacs is all but forgoten.
Vim wins.
Recently, I recommended to a friend that basic vim/vi is worth learning because it’s a baseline that you can always trust will be there across different Linux systems.
They asked me what I used most on my home system, and the answer was emacs, but I was very clear that I was not recommending it. It’s a particular kind of person who finds themselves at home in emacs, and for everyone besides those people, selling them on emacs would feel like persuading them to do hard drugs.
Coding in Ansible?
You write Ansible playbooks to automate infrastructure management. But calling it a coding language might be a stretch it is just yaml
Ah, nice one! Didn’t realize it could even be done.
Vi hasn’t been updated since 2005. Aren’t everyone just using vim or neovim?
Everyone at work is using Cursor these days, except for me using neovim and my emacs loving coworker. When we present during pair programming our coworkers go nuts over watching our workflows and trying to figure out if they can do similar things in Cursor lol.
What is Cursor, another AI-infested slop?
Neovim and emacs are both incredibly heavy. I would rather just use something like VScodium.
Nano and Vim are small and quick.
Java? vi!
COBOL? vi!
SVG? Believe it or not, vi!/s
SVG, unironically yes. There’s a few times where I found a library or WYSIWYG editor making some strange choices for its SVG output, and I had to fix it manually.
Editing excel spreadsheet? VI
Excel files (.xlsx) is just an archive of some XML files and whatnot, so sure you could edit them in vim.
Though I’d rather edit them in CSV format
I know this is supposed to be a joke. But, VI is awful, and i can’t believe anybody would use that over a modern editor. But, I know some people who like it.
Literally the only thing I code in at work. Have done so for decades.
Can’t stop, won’t stop.
Yeah, it’s a dinosaurs tool for people who refuse to adapt to new stuff.
Imagine thinking modern IDE are more efficient than vi 😯
Curser is more intuitive, I agree, but you will never win a code race against similar skilled coder on vi…
Coding isn’t a race, it’s a team sport. And if you think its not, you’re in the wrong profession.
Umm, there are regularly coding race events here where I live…
Coding can be hobby as well, you know.
Not all of this world is pure capitalism, some have some free time doing stuff they want how they want.
Coding is not my profession (right now)
If you value it as a hobby, don’t make it that again :)
😄 why would someone not make his hobby his profession?
I have never coded as major part of profession, yet, but I am on the way there.
Modern “vi” is typically a symlink to vim, and as long as compatibility is disabled it’s very useful; especially when working over ssh or quick and dirty config editing that doesn’t warrant a full blown ide to be started up.
Nano is just better and I’ll happily die on this hill
We will die together brother…
NANO FOR LIFE
I use nano for editing config files in the terminal. For everything else I use VSCodium. Roast me.
You already did that yourself
No
Nano is easier to get into, but far more limited.
And easier to get out of…
Is it? If it wasn’t printed on the bottom, would you really be able to guess Ctrl+X, Y, Enter any easier than colon, q, Enter?
The key difference here is “it’s printed at the bottom”.
I don’t immediately need a user guide to tell me how to save and exit the program
skill issue
Sorry maybe I’m dumb. But does this mean VIM and Obsidian are Vi?
I usually refer to im as “vi” just to
make people think I’m old school and coolsave time typing that last character.But Obsidian??
Oh yes. My “excell isn’t a database” program. Obsidian.
I want to understand this comment!
