Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Both Emacs and Vim are updated regularly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs#Release_history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29#Release_h...

In between major releases they have tons and tons of bug fixes (Vim probably has hundreds per release).

Editors can suffer a lot from code rot since they have to integrate with a lot of things. An Open Source version could be quite interesting from Sublime's community point of view. I don't know about the developer's income while this happens, though.

View on HN

Looking at the links you posted - vim is updated once every 3-4 years, emacs - once a year. Looking at sublime text release log (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/) it's been updated much more often than emacs and vim combined.

It's the difference between updated and released. The last Emacs commit was this morning around 9:30am. There is ongoing development on both editors.

> Looking at the links you posted - vim is updated once every 3-4 years, emacs - once a year. Looking at sublime text release log (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/) it's been updated much more often than emacs and vim combined.

Honestly though. Emacs was first released almost half a century ago. Its core is fairly feature-complete. It doesn't need intense development and constant releases.

Besides, at least for Emacs, one of the main driving principles is for it to have a good & stable core, and have all the bells and whistles delivered via extensions and packages. And those extensions gets updated continuously. Often from git commit to git commit, depending on author.

When you have decades worth of customizations and ecosystem-code to consider, keeping the core stable is the only strategy you can possibly choose.

Your comparison isn't apples to oranges, it's 40 years old whisky to diet coke.

Edit: Half a century, not decade. Thanks dragonwriter.

> Emacs was first release almost half a decade ago.

Closer to half a century, which I guess reinforces your point.

Really the most work you'll be interested in as a user will be the plugin side. You the ST community doing good work, or you have the army of github and then some always working on vim plugins. I know who I'm going with :P

While it is nice that they're both updated regularly, I'm not sure that hundreds of bug fixes per release is actually comforting. (I say this as a happy Vim user :)

Considering the humongous amount of corner cases Vim covers and the huge base of knowledgeable users that push Vim to its limits, I'd say that the bug count is to be expected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com