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Comment by conorh | Hacker News Reader

There is plenty of room for competition. Everyone has their own needs and wants for a code editor and I would disagree with your definition. In general I want my code editor to be simple rather than try to be smart; be fast, do basic syntax highlighting, provide nice search.

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+1 on the search part. I think Sublime shines there. I cannot imagine spending $70 for an editor, but I would really like it if Emacs' code browsing was as smooth as sublime's @

Curious, how do you browse code in Sublime that you can't in emacs? I've seen coworkers using Sublime navigate code much the same as I do in emacs which is mostly just by using incremental search.

I use Emacs at home and ST2 at work, and there are two things that ST2 does much, much better, both related to browsing large projects. One is scrolling - Emacs always wants to jump too many lines at a time, so it's very difficult to get lines of code exactly where you want them. The other is tree navigation - speedbar is more powerful, but you can't see multiple directories at once, which makes it hard to get a feel for the structure of the project as a whole.

Many times, I find myself just 'C-s' or 'C-r' (searching) in Emacs to the piece of code I want, even if it's already visible, then doing 'C-l' to get it centered. And when org-mode is loaded, 'C-l' will cycle through making the current line vertically centered, top of buffer, and bottom of buffer. Not sure it's what you're looking for, but that's what I do, and I'm sure there's a way to customize how far emacs will scroll ('M-x customize-variable RET scroll TAB TAB' might be a good starting point for looking into this).

I also mostly navigate using C-s and C-r. Also, when you do that you can recursively use C-u C-SPACE which brings you back to where you were previously, this feature is really awesome, since most of the time you move in the code temporarily to adjust something somewhere else or even just to lookup something somewhere else.

WRT scrolling, this is what I use in my .emacs:

    (setq scroll-margin 0
      scroll-conservatively 100000
      scroll-preserve-screen-position 1)
    (setq mouse-wheel-scroll-amount '(3 ((shift) . 1))) ;; one line at a time
    (setq mouse-wheel-progressive-speed nil) ;; don't accelerate scrolling
    (setq mouse-wheel-follow-mouse 't)
    ;; scroll window under mouse
    (setq scroll-step 1)

I dislike accelerated scrolling and use searches or registers for moving in big files, so this works quite nicely for me.

I was specifically talking about C-r file@function_name All the parts are fuzzy. So if I wanted to go to function install_local_package in helper_functions.py, I can type C-r h_fu@ins_l_p (pretty much like we use ido)

While I use Emacs for all my editing, this would have been cool to have.

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