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Comment by throwawaybutwhy | Hacker News Reader

Ah ok. The usual editor wars. There's one point that has to be made: software lives or dies (or withers on the vine) due to network effects. In the case of Micro vs Vim vs Emacs it's all about keybindings and the time to learn them. Micro uses CUA [0] keybindings intuitive for most Windows users, while Vim and Emacs (cua-mode notwithstanding) are stuck in the middle of shallow local optima.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.bou...

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I'm sure Micro is great, but I doubt it's anywhere even near Vim or Emacs, in any respect. Because it's not "all about keybindings," and claiming that either of those editors is stuck in a local optimum is simply counterfactual. As for living and dying, Vim is 30 years old and Emacs is 45 years old. We'll just have to see how long Micro stays in the game.

Right. I think saying 'Vim/Emacs aren't as good as other editors because they're unapproachable to new learners' is like saying 'Linux is a worse OS than Windows because it's hard to use'. -- Sure, you want something to be accessible to everyone. But there's also a benefit to enabling power-users to learn the system.

That said, kakoune looks like an interesting demonstration that maybe vim's <action><text selection> commands could be clearer as <text selection><action>.

Absolutely---also, Emacs, Vim and GNU/Linux aren't hard to use. You just have to accept that they're not like Windows and follow the instructions on the screen. The documentation is generally very well written and exists from beginner level to advanced. There are also tons of places where you can go to get help when you get stuck.

Imo the whole "hard to use" thing mostly comes from people who feel they are already expert (at something in Windows) and get frustrated when they discover that there are other paradigms in which they are still beginners. So they label their own knowledge as doxa, and anything that doesn't conform to it is labeled "unintuitive," "obscure," "dated," "hard to use" etc. The same mechanism is behind quite a few of the voices claiming GNU/Linux communities are unfriendly or abrasive (i.e. someone gets frustrated upon the discovery that not everyone recognizes them as the expert they think they are).

But on the other hand a very large chunk of those who would ever consider using a non-GUI text editor come from a vi or Emacs background.

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