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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Well, he said he was using Visual Studio. Everything is hard in Visual Studio.

In emacs, I could see two files next to each other with C-x 3. Or, I could see the same file in two columns by typing M-x follow-mode after C-x 3. (In fact, I use a 1920x1200 display for most of my coding, and I end up with 3 emacs windows next to each other. Very efficient. Wide-screen is great for coding.)

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For what it's worth, this is Hacker News. We're polite here and try to avoid snark whenever possible. We tend to offer explanations when we refute something rather than resorting to name calling. Observe:

http://img.expatsoftware.com/blog/vs_split.gif

That's a screenshot of Visual Studio with files lined up in columns. It's actually a really good development environment. You should give it a try one day.

I have. Of many bugs, the random irretrievable code deletion feature was my least favorite.

I've up voted you. Could someone explain the negatives? I had problems with both Microsoft and Borland IDEs coerced to multicolumn (which had to be multiwin, no other way) on the same file too.

Finally nice to hear from someone else that does that. I still code to the ol' 80-col limits (with minor exceptions as needed) so I can stack two or three emacs next to each other. I use real separate frames, so I get two tiers of navigation control, ALT-TAB from my window manager to switch frmaes, and ye olde C-x o within a frame.

But everyone looks at me like I'm a kook when I show this off in person.

While I like lots of vertical space as much as the next person, I find that in practice there is a diminishing return in how useful one large monolithic window can be, and being able to split it (in the same file or not) is way more useful. It is striking to me how often I will have four files open simultaneously and be using all of them in quick succession.

Cool. If you use one frame, though, you have access to things like windmove (Shift-Up/Down/Left/Right to navigate between windows) and window-number (each window gets a number, and you M-<number> to switch to the window). I also have some hacks I use to improve this, iswitch-windows and snap-to-terminal (easily the most useful 10 lines of code I've ever written).

Windmove is core emacs, I think, and the window-number stuff is on the Emacs wiki:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WindMove

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/window-number.el

My stuff is here:

http://github.com/jrockway/elisp/blob/d33170528fbf4ea1738426...

Hopefully something is useful; patches welcome ;)

I agree, wide-screen is great. I've noticed that many developers often code in a single editor window (using tabs or buffers, etc). Is that common?

I have been coding for years with multiple editor windows open in various forms - browsers in Smalltalk, multiple windows in Xcode, Eclipse, etc. If you use multiple windows, you can always fit 2 (or even more) windows side by side on a widescreen. I definitely prefer a wider than a taller screen.

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