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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Typical designer. "Oh no, my text editor displays its status to me using text."

Yeah. Some people get their eye-candy feed from lolcat videos, and then use their tools for work. (My desktop doesn't even have wobbly windows! Just a 1-px red border! How can I get any work done that way!)

Also, I'm fairly certain that eproject gets rid of the "wall of text" that disqualifies Emacs. In a perl project, for example, I can hit C-c C-f to find project files, but the files are displayed as the names of their resources -- instead of lib/Foo/Bar.pm, I see "Foo::Bar".

Personally, though, I just "eproject-open-all-project-files" when I start working, and then just iswitchb to the file I want to work in. Usually, you are two or three characters away from any file you want.

Learning and thinking > pretty.

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I think your attitude is overly dismissive. At least, I'd have a hard time writing someone off as a "typical designer" (a bit of a tired stereotype) if they're experienced in both vim and emacs, let alone work for Peepcode. The author offered a sustained, reasoned argument for better navigation within projects.

I agree that as a programmer, I care about functionality and tools that get out of my way so that I can get my work done quickly and efficiently. But I don't think that means that everything has to look ugly (or better - that it couldn't be more elegantly presented).

I'm a Vim user, and rarely leave full-screen mode. It's a great app, but on large projects even with the Fuzzy File Finder plugin, I agree that navigating can be cumbersome. I'd like to try out Jamis Buck's "Fuzzy Finder Textmate" plugin that builds on this, but have had trouble getting it installed on both my desktop and laptop.

tl/dr: The author knows what s/he's talking about, and things can be pretty and functional, too.

As far as I know, Fuzzy Finder Textmate only works with Fuzzy Finder up till version 2.16.

Look through the forks of fuzzyfinder_textmate on github - Jamis has stopped maintaining it to work with the latest FuzzyFinder, but other people are still working on their forks to keep it up to date.

If you've had trouble setting up fuzzy_finder textmate, check out my post: http://codeulate.com/2010/02/installing-fuzzyfinder_textmate...

I walk you through it step by step.

I've gone through this process a number of times on different computers so I imagine that others will find this quite useful. Thanks for writing it up!

As an aside, I think you can just download the 2.16 version of fuzzyfinder from vim.org and it will work with Jamis' plugin. That's the version I use - love this plugin and I doubt I'd be able to use vim without it!

Constantly mentioning how you're using a tiling wm is the new constantly mentioning you don't have a TV.

Ah, the Rubyists are here.

But you just did the same, if you didn't know xmonad you wouldn't know of the 1px red border either! ;)

The thesis of the article isn't "pretty > learning and thinking", and I don't think your distinction between the two is valid. User interfaces shouldn't be left to rot in the name of "learning and thinking". It's important to consider the way something looks and functions as it affects your ability to use it considerably. Form matters just as much as content. You can learn and think and have things be pretty all at once.

Furthermore, I don't think you're really addressing the core of the article. He mentioned the word "ugly" once, and it wasn't even the bulk of his criticism: Emacs doesn't provide all the features he wants. The "Metadata" icon was left of off Emacs, and he goes on to mention things such as searching on class and method names.

> Just a 1-px red border!

You don't use xmonad, perchance? It's the only one I know of that uses the one red pixel in the default scheme. I guess Awesome or the like might too, but I haven't used them in a long time. Tiling window managers are a great example of something that is less "advanced" but more useful.

And as far as I can tell, both Emacs and Vim can easily satisfy all but the "beautiful" requirement for him. I think he should just replace all of his requirements with, "a powerful and extensible plug-in system."

Yup, I use xmonad :)

http://github.com/jrockway/dotfiles/blob/master/xmonad/xmona...

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