Hacker News Reader

Comment by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh | Hacker News Reader

vim is also pretty slow these days.

Even after I did the usual toil of analyzing startup times and trimming my vimrc, its speed/responsiveness correlates inversely with the size of the text file that's open. And we're not talking about some artifically-constructed benchmark — just an extra-long ordinary text file (or log file, or code file) sitting around will be enough to make vim start to feel slow.

Maybe we're all just getting old, and the dream of "one text editor for everything" is becoming one of those quaint old notions of yesteryear.

View on HN

> Maybe we're all just getting old, and the dream of "one text editor for everything" is becoming one of those quaint old notions of yesteryear.

I mean, that's only ever been a dream in the emacs community. Vim might have toy plugins for other stuff, but by and large people use it to edit period. As it should be, isn't the whole UNIX philosophy to do one thing well? If I want email or a text browser in the CLI (I don't) I'll use dedicated, better, faster programs, each on a tmux pane that I can use instantly with a keyboard shortcut, rather than wait for a slow emacs buffer to load.

> I mean, that's only ever been a dream in the emacs community.

That's not true and not something you could really accurately guess at.

I have exclusively used one text editor for everything (emacs) for many years.

I also know others that have done the same.

The problem is one of context. When editing a programming language buffer, the editor needs to be aware of the entire buffer, because a { on the first line could match to a } on the 1235987th line and affect hilighting as well as editing commands like indentation, or sexp navigation. Meanwhile, ideally, in a log buffer the only information needed to nicely render a single line is contained on that line. Or perhaps the log unit is multiline, but still somehow boundable. In that case the editor should be able to do presentation in constant time based on the segment of the buffer that's visible.

Unfortunately, what with logging in JSON and so on, these two cases aren't really distinct anymore. But if I did want to use one editor for both log viewing and coding, I'd pick the one that was the most easily and interactively customizable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com