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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I went from Emacs to Sublime and back to Emacs. The UI could be improved, maybe, but there's a lot to be said for knowing that your editor will still exist next year. I'm frankly not confident in ST3, but I'm 100% certain that Emacs will be there.

But beyond that, I find that a lot more stuff Just Works in Emacs. I spend my days working in Python, and both major Python modes for Emacs are miles ahead of ST's equivalents. Things like linters work as expected and there are lot more packages available for niche things. Emacs is subjectively better, even if the UI doesn't feel as platform-native as other editors.

I don't use Emacs because I'm a graybeard afraid to learn something new. I use it because I've tried every new hotness to come along and I've yet to find something as powerful, well-supported, and ubiquitous.

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The thing is, in this day and age most people don't need their editor to last 100 years. Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access & friends, you can just switch to another editor.

Meanwhile, if you're used to Vi's modal editing or Emacs's elisp, you're basically going to hate the other tools forever if for whatever reason. For example if you need IDE features for your project or the Vim/Emacs extensions for language X are no stable/flexible enough.

Nearly every IDE of importance has either a full VIM plugin or is working hard on it. Not having to take your hands off the keyboard line to hit the arrows or mouse is a big deal to a lot of devs. Having easy and powerful regex is nearly as important. And having buffers is probably a close number three.

How do you reach the escape key?

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

Personally, mapping Caps Lock to Ctrl (which I do anyway) and using Ctrl-C works best. I use vim and IntelliJ's vim emulation on an international keyboard where Ctrl-[ won't work.

So the entire argument about not moving one's hands is moot then, since in emacs you get navigation via control-key for free, and in vi you need to remap the most important key to something near home row.

Got it. Thanks.

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were actually interested in the answer. I won't get into an emacs/vim war, thank you, I got tired of it circa 1999.

I'm not interested in a war either. I'm only interested in both sides presenting fair arguments. If one side says "but the other side has to move their hands" and leaves out "oh, my side does too, unless I rebind keys", then that's unfair, and I'll say something.

If you think that places me on the other side of the argument (it doesn't), that's on you. It simply puts me in the middle.

Once you're past the basic navigation cluster + cut/copy/paste/undo/save (which tend to be more Windows-style, I'd say, than CUA!) every editor is different.

Ctrl+F for Find is a common standard, for example, but it's hit or miss whether this is Ctrl+F for Find (and that's your lot! Find & Replace is something entirely different), Ctrl+F for Find (and you have a checkbox for Replace), Ctrl+F for Find (and you have a checkbox for Replace... and this is how you search across multiple files as well). And there are multiple standards for all of these additional options. Your muscle memory will be useless no matter what you're used to. You're welcome to describe emacs as unusual... but don't assume everything else is a nirvana of UI consistency. The process of "just" switching can be a bit more inconvenient than you might think ;)

Do you really use one editor for everything?

When I'm working on Python code, I'm in PyCharm. My C++ work on Windows is in Visual Studio. When I ssh into the Linux machine that serves our in-house documentation to make changes, I'm using vim. On OSX, I use BBEDit most of the time. When I'm writing a letter, I'm usually in Word or Google Docs.

I think if I spent all day every day in one environment, I would get bored.

> Do you really use one editor for everything?

Yes, at least whenever possible.

> I think if I spent all day every day in one environment, I would get bored.

The opposite perspective: It's extremely frustrating constantly switching between significantly different environments with different UIs, different hotkeys, subtly different jargon, etc.

> It's extremely frustrating constantly switching

Maybe that's the difference. I'm not a productive multitasker. When I have some Python to work on, that's all I'm doing for the next day or two. I'm not jumping from Word to PyCharm to Vim all day.

> The UI could be improved, maybe, but there's a lot to be said for knowing that your editor will still exist next year. I'm frankly not confident in ST3, but I'm 100% certain that Emacs will be there.

This is misleading. In the era of JetBrains and its perpetual licensing and Steam and whatnot, it's worth pointing out that ST3 is a binary that you download and have complete access to, so of course it will be there next year.

You're probably getting at the fact that development may stop on it next year, and that's true, but the product is still pretty polished and useful now.

I also don't have your confidence that Emacs will always be there. I don't have statistics - but have contributions been increasing or decreasing in the last decade? In any case, I hope that Emacs fades away: text editing is great, but I think there's still plenty of room to advance our craft. Things like Lamdu and Eve (nee Light Table) are interesting explorations.

Emacs is actually having a bit of a renaissance - ever since package.el came out and became widely adopted, Emacs adoption seems to have increased significantly, and Emacs development is quite active these days.

And 25 is near and with xwidget support, i.e. embedding things like a Webkit instance in a buffer. I guess I will be able to "exec emacs --debug-init" in my .xsession soon.

There is EXWM, an X window manager for Emacs: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

Here are some screenshots: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/wiki/Screenshots

Actually you can - http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager....

All you need to do is to set up a couple of hotkeys for things that Emacs cannot do (yet), like (start-process "" nil "xdg-open" "http://some.flashy.javascript.website")

I'm eagerly waiting for the day I can use emacs as my window manager.

You're waiting for a day in the past: See EXWM, links in a sibling comment. With it, you can use emacs as your window manager already.

That would be awesome! Is it actually stable and/or usable?

I tried it very early and it was unstable, but I'm following its development, and it seems that it'll be stable shortly. I'm using ratpoison nowadays, though I'll switch to it when it's stable enough and emacs gets multithreading.

> it's worth pointing out that ST3 is a binary that you download and have complete access to, so of course it will be there next year

This is not "being there." Popular architectures change, as do operating systems. Unless you intend to freeze your current computing environment for posterity, a working executable means nothing.

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