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Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

I think its much more important to become good at using whatever text editor is infront of you - i.e. learning the standard Windows/Mac shortcuts, instead of becoming reliant on what I consider the 'old' style of text editor.

Yet to meet anyone using vim or emacs who is actually more productive than me... the more productive people use Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse or whatever else is infront of them.

Maybe I am wrong, but I think typing is probably 30% or less of the time I spend coding... and thinking to make sure I write less code is probably more valuable than typing faster, not just in saving me time, but in improving stability and ease of reading code...

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Emacs is great, Vim is great, Visual Studio is great, Eclipse is great. Use whatever you like, ship great code.

FYI GNU Readline shortcuts - basically Emacs shortcuts - are defaults on OSX...

My idea is: Use whatever makes you happy. A happy person is sure to be more productive than an unhappy one. If you like IDEs, use those. If you like old fashioned text editors, use those. If you like new fangled text editors, use those.

Just always keep an eye out how you can improve yourself and your tools. There are many hidden joys to be found in all those programs, methodologies and workflows. Don't fall into the trap that just because you committed to one thing, you can't try another. There is nothing worse than being limited by your tools and not even noticing it.

Even if you don't stick with the new stuff in the long run, you will probably still learn something valuable. Learning a new tool or language or methodology is like visiting a foreign country. It is not so much about seeing new stuff, but more about gaining new insight in your own ways and getting a new appreciation and context for what you take for granted.

Be happy and keep an open mind is all I'm saying.

Editor war!

You are confusing non-expressive languages like C# and Java which needs lots of "refactoring" and lots of boilerplate code (hence the need for code generators which understand "patterns" and refactoring tools etc.) with "productive languages", for a start.

Then your point is moot anyway: since quite some time there are vim programmers using an Eclipse bridge and getting the Eclipse features right from inside vim (it's called "eclim") and there's, of course, a port to Emacs ("emacs-eclim") which, despite only being used by a few people, works quite well (I'm using it and getting the best of both world and for when I do really need to something inside that piece of underperforming bloat that Eclipse is, I can just switch to it in a heartbeat).

But anyway, even without these Eclipse bridges, if you do really think that someone using, say, Visual Studio to develop C# code is more productive than a programmer using Emacs to develop Clojure code I'd like to have some of the stuff you're smoking because it looks good ; )

To me the biggest issue with Eclipse / Visual Studio / IntelliJ is that their "text editor" part is really terrible.

In addition to that, programmers do craft tools to make their life easier : to me it's only logical that a programmer would want to be able to program his editor.

I suggest to take a look at the "Emacs rocks!" series on YouTube to get a feel of what's possible using Emacs.

To me a good example of a productive programmer using Emacs would be Rich Hickey. He created the Lisp dialect Clojure and then he went on to create an amazing DB (Datomic) using Clojure. He knows about productivity...

Now of course if you're stuck in the C#/NHibernate/SQL hell working on apps full of mutability and where it's close to impossible to reproduce state, I do understand why you feel Visual Studio would be better. But I do really your ability to "move fast" compared to people using more advanced technologies and who are not stuck in the "design pattern" / ORM mindset...

look at a Stream/Recording of Minecraft creator Notch writing game code in Eclipse and i bet you will think twice before sniffing at IDEs like Eclipse in that way again.

  > Editor war!

Please don't.

> non-expressive languages like C#

C# is a quite expressive language in my opinion. And i'm quite versed in Clojure, which seems to be your language of predilection. It does have limited type inference and lambdas, which makes it a lot less painful than Java.

It really depends on the problem you have at hand anyway. But even if you have a problem where you need a more functional approach, with immutable data structures, you can use F#, which is an amazing language.

> But anyway, even without these Eclipse bridges, if you do really think that someone using, say, Visual Studio to develop C# code is more productive than a programmer using Emacs to develop Clojure code I'd like to have some of the stuff you're smoking because it looks good ; )

I use Visual Studio to develop C# code. I use Eclipse if i have to code Scala. I use emacs if i have to clojure, i actually used it to develop Clojurescript's Lua backend. Most of them have good vim bindings anyway, but in emacs i prefer to use emacs.

C# with Visual Studio can be the most productive of languages, provided the good use case. And you sound like you know nothing about what you're talking about.

I can really recommend Evil mode for Vim goodness in Emacs!

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Downvoted because I'm not entirely sure what point this is addressing, and really, people have preferences for editors.

So fucking what if someone has the audacity to eschew vim/emacs/ed/acme/pen and paper in favour of a nice IDE they're familiar and productive with? You don't get any geek-cred for using any editor over the alternatives.

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