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Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

I have watched a number of demos of Acme and I have two general takeaways. The idea of adding “buttons” (so to speak) to the toolbar by just writing text seems incredibly cool, and I doubt I would ever enjoy actually using Acme.

Like a lot of people, I went through an EMacs/Vim phase. Then went SublimeText, and now I live happily in VSCode. I feel very uncool to say it, but I just work really quickly with VSCode and I think it’s more because of a thousand micro-optimized UX choices by Microsoft rather than a particularly elegant core design, which is how I’d characterize Acme based on those demo videos. This is sadly how I feel about a lot of software these days.

I’d be happy to be wrong.

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I used acme as my main text editor for a few years and a lot of what you say resonates with me. The biggest problem I had with amce wasn't the editor itself but the lack of easy to use integrations.

Acme integrates well with external programs. This is really nice, but I don't want to spend the time writing all of my own integrations. Maybe I can justify that effort if I work in one codebase for a long time, but I've bounced around and haven't thought the investment would be worthwhile.

Compare with vscode: actively developed and you just click some buttons to get all the integrations. Just so much less friction.

If acme had an active community around it the situation may be different. But that's just not the case.

This is an important point: not only the Acme community doesn't want to implement features, they also don't want to share the way things can be automated. This article is a good example: the author spends 90% of the time explaining why things shouldn't be done, instead of explaining how exactly he does it. This is not a great way to create a community.

I'm against VSCode because it's a Microsoft product. I've been working on kernels for several decades and I remember when they tried to kill Linux and ran an entire ad campaign around it. Their entire embrace, extend, extinguish is still alive, and they're only embracing OSS because they lost their end user device battle (because their OS is trash) and had to pivot to cloud where people were already embracing OSS. WSL, running my editor in the cloud and paying for a subscription, having Microsoft control your editor, it's all clearly a dystopia for developers that leads to lock in, paying for things that should be free, and an invasion of privacy that should be avoided at all cost.

There are so many editors to choose from. I get that not everyone wants invest in Vim/Emacs, even though you should and it will pay off, and the vast majority of the programmers that are doing great things are using Vim/Emacs (seriously, I have a list of big names and except for some rare exceptions like James Gosling who apparently uses Netbeans, EVERYONE noteworthy uses Vim/Emacs), and it's OSS, and in Vim's case it's also helping a charity. But if you are the person who just can't get there with Vim/Emacs, at least don't give yourself over to Microsoft. Use Sublime, Nova, BB, etc. They're all great editors by small companies making cool stuff and they'll get way more out of your support than Microsoft.

It would be cool to have a wiki page of who uses what.

Torvalds uses MicroEmacs, but I don't know what Poettering, Taymans, Realthunder, Bellard(I assume he knows a CLI editor though) are up to. No clue what the devs of Obsidian use. Lots of LibreOffice devs seem to use VS Code.

And of course, in the JS ecosystem IDEs seem pretty common.

Van Rossum uses Vim it seems. But mostly all the devs I respect most don't seem to talk a lot about editor choice. I guess most of them are probably on a CLI editor but ALL? There's gotta be a few that are on IDEs, right?

What do the Red Hat people use?

Also Sublime/Nova/BB seem to be for Mac and not free.

VSCode being free as in beer is a pretty big draw. There isn't all that many alternatives to VS Code that have that level of features unless you want to do some real setup work, and have another customized suite in your life to maintain.

> I'm against VSCode because it's a Microsoft product.

Note that there is also VSCodium [1], an OSS fork of VSCode with the M$ telemetry removed. I'm a heavy vim user but for cross-platform development with .NET SDK or Node.js VSCodium has pretty good support with the huge number of available extensions. If I want to tweak the editor's behavior, it's not harder, or even easier, than with vim. I find writing an extension for VSCodium in JS more approachable than doing the equivalent with vimscript.

[1] https://vscodium.com

I get the anti-corporate opinion. I don’t think it totally fits here because VSCode is FOSS, and it offers them a very limited moat; if they tried to push something weird then you can bet on a fork or the myriad of alternatives in the saturated editor market. I work against aggregated market power for my day job, but this isn’t a case that needs fighting IMO.

As for the appeal to true hackerdom, I guess I’ll just hope I’m in the minority of great-thing-doers.

>VSCode is FOSS not really, the Microsoft extension store/repository is the only practical way to install extensions, and the totally open-source fork (VSCodium) is literally unable to install a lot of fairly key extensions because MS is apparently alright with open-sourcing the editor but not the tools they build for it. regardless, I do not want to have to disable telemetry in my text editor -- the idea that it exists in the first place is frankly baffling.

I can't do VSCode anymore.

I want to make a big stand about Microsoft and free software and tracking and whatnot, but I can't here. I break those rules at work all the time during time crunches.

It's kinda petty, but the bits of screen real estate it steals around the sides of the screen are too distracting for me after having gone full vim for a while. You can hide most of it, but the activity bar keeps showing back up after doing something like opening the git/file explorer/etc panes.

The IntelliJ line is a bit better, you can hide everything pretty easy, but I don't always have a corporate license for those, so I tend to avoid depending on them.

It's crazt to see how heavily the FOSS community focuses on first principles thinking.

Microsoft really understood, and still does, understand the value of the other kind of design, based on common task patterns and human factors rather than naturally flowing from some core philosophy.

Elegant software always requires you to learn to adapt not only the task but your thinking to the tools, and you're pretty much on your own to design a workflow, Microsoft style design tries to give you an obvious way to do the common stuff, even if it's inelegant and hackish and has no basis in any logic, it's reliable and widely known and easy.

Elegance is a pretty heavy constraint.

I think there's a selection effect there too - or equivalently, maybe the causation goes the other direction.

If you tend to think in terms of first principles, you're more likely to have boarded the FOSS bandwagon in the first place. If you think in terms of tasks and practicality, you're more likely to have chosen to work for Microsoft. Each ecosystem reflects the principles of those who join them.

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