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Comment by vr46 | Hacker News Reader

Sublime is an excellent editor and anyone who looks down on anyone else for their choice is not doing so because they are a Vim/Emacs user, it is because they are being an idiot.

I feel that Textmate really showed everyone how good a GUI editor could be - we are going back approximately 12 years, and BBEdit, Alpha, Smultron, Hydra/SubEthaEdit were the main contenders at the time.

I concur about Spacemacs, it promises much but things quickly go awry for me whenever I've tried it. Confusion in Vim is easily engineered out in a config or two, and one of the main benefits of learning Vim or its bindings is that it's very likely to still be with me just before I breathe my last.

Text Editors are investments in a fast moving technology industry and Vim/Emacs are a global reserve currency.

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My main reason why, despite me loving Sublime Text, am not using it is because during their silent phase a ton of plugin developers jumped ship (me included).

Now crucial plugins like Vintageous (vim emulation) are dead and not being maintained anymore.

Then there are things that are still not possible, despite it being an issue for a long time. Stuff like relative line numbers and gutter plugins overriding each other constantly.

Currently I am still using VIM because it does exactly what I want it to do. I know what a keystroke does and why and am one line change away to optimize bad behaviour. But despite that, I have to say that vscode is currently probably the champ out there. You almost don't feel the electron overhead at all. It's blazing fast, intuitive and snappy with an active plugin ecosystem. I'm hoping to get a little bit of free time soon to port some of my vimrc to vscode.

It's blazing fast, intuitive and snappy with an active plugin ecosystem.

I use VS Code quite a bit in my current role, and while I agree with most of what you just said, I do have to note that VS Code's startup time is noticeably longer than vim's. There's this weird interval where the window is up, but the editor tab hasn't loaded yet where the program seems unresponsive to input. Once everything is running, VS Code is fairly responsive, but that startup lag isn't something I see in vim.

I had forgotten about the "quiet time" of Sublime. It felt like a repeat of the Textmate downtime.

I had also forgotten about VSCode. I like having a GUI editor handy in my dock for quickly opening something drag-n-drop style. And most of the editors I can see in there right now are a little laggy (I'm looking at you Atom, and you, Brackets) so VSCode is now downloading for a quick test.

Emacs will respond to a file's being dropped onto its dock icon (and the response can be whatever Lisp code you want) but of course there has to be an Emacs icon in the Dock, which means the Emacs cannot be running "inside" a terminal.

If you enable server-mode you can run gui emacs to get the icon in the doc and pop up a gui window when you drop something on it, while also connecting in a terminal.

Waiting for the Emacs chorded key command for hacking your ocular nerve to capture which icon you are staying at to then open your file...

You're joking, but I recently thought about the idea that we could actually use the advent of cheap eye tracking software for gaming to write an EasyMotion-like plugin that moves the cursor to the position on the screen you're currently looking at.

For now, this will sadly likely keep to prove difficult since the driver situation on linux isn't really good yet.

Vintageous appears to have been abandoned by the author in favour of a commercial (i.e paid) alternative: http://www.sublimesix.com/index.html

Not available: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Six

Sublime is an excellent editor and anyone who looks down on anyone else for their choice is not doing so because they are a Vim/Emacs user, it is because they are being an idiot.

Restating for emphasis. Text editors are tools. They're means, not ends. As long as you're getting your work done, I don't care whether you use vim, emacs, Sublime, Atom, VS Code, nano, or even notepad.exe.

At my last job, I used vim, one co-worker used emacs, while a third co-worker used Sublime. While we had our fair share of good-natured ribbing, I don't think any of us looked down on the others for using a different editor.

I agree with your point of view. Additionally I would add that there are some tools which are obviously not worth it. Someone who wants to use notepad.exe for serious programming must show me first that they can be as productive with it as normal people are with other tools. You need to be able to reach the end, to validate a tool as a means.

This seems disingenuous. I mean, the "as long as" is the key qualifier. If I showed you someone who uses sublime and someone who does all their coding in notepad, and asked you to bet on which was a better programmer (for some metric of better) can you honestly say that you wouldn't bet against the notepadder?

The example of notepad.exe was admittedly a bit hyperbolic, but I knew some pretty decent programmers who'd write code in nano or gEdit.

> or even notepad.exe

As long as you write all your code on one line

\r\n

An OS schism derived from a mechanical typewriter (teletype): carriage return.

I appreciate how Windows is passive aggressively compatible with mechanical typewriters.

> Sublime is an excellent editor and anyone who looks down on anyone else for their choice is not doing so because they are a Vim/Emacs user, it is because they are being an idiot.

So FOSS proponents are idiots according to you? Noted.

If you're a FOSS proponents that looks down on people just for using non-FOSS software, then yes you are an idiot.

I don't necessarily look down on people in prison, I just feel compassion for them, especially if they live in a prison they can just walk out of any time they wanted.

It's possible to be a FOSS proponent without taking it personally whenever someone uses a non-free piece of software.

No. He doesn't say "you are an idiot because you are a proponent of X (for any kind of X)" he says you are an idiot for being an OPONENT of other valid Xs. If you like FOSS without looking down on others you are not an idiot according to what he says.

I think (hope?) it's less about the specific technology than about the general attitude of looking down on someone for the choice.

Life is short, and someone that uses another tool might just have a good reason for it (that can be learned from).

> Anyone who looks down on anyone else [...] is being an idiot.

FTFY :)

Yes, quite right.

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