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Comment by technomancy | Hacker News Reader

> you can't be productive with it if you need to write more than small pieces of code.

This is possibly true in Java, but in better languages you don't need much help from your editor to be productive.

Oh please... emacs and vim are way behind even crappy IDEs let alone solid ones like Netbeans. They lack some basic features that any working programmers cannot be productive without. I'm not talking anything fancy like Intellisense but basic features like syntax highlighting, file browsing , and a decent debugger are missing. I know someone is going to say "oh but you can configure and hack around to get those features", but thing is I don't wanna have to fight with my development environment to get these basic features.

This isn't even remotely correct. Both emacs and vim have had those features out of the box for years. Decades, even.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

vim comes with syntax highlighting and file browsing built-in. You just have to enable the syntax highlighting, but it's one command to put into your rc. Yes vim has some sucky defaults, but it's disingenuous to call these simple cases "hacks" or to suggest it takes fighting the software to get it working.

vim doesn't have a debugger since it's outside the scope of vim, which is just an editor. If you want an "all-in-one" philosophy, maybe emacs will treat you better.

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