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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that finding an open source, well established and powerful editor is an investment worth making. That basically means vim or emacs. Once over the learning curve, you're setup for long term productivity gains and stability. Since neither editor is going anywhere and they run on pretty much anything.

But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it. Sublime, Atom and VS Code are all very popular because you just install them and start coding.

I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.

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> But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it. Sublime, Atom and VS Code are all very popular because you just install them and start coding.

This does a great disservice to the quality and functionality of Sublime.

I was a fluent vim user before switching to Sublime and have never looked back. The smooth (i.e. not line-by-line) scrolling and powerful multi-cursors were enough to draw me. The little things like a beautiful file explorer sidebar with icons-per-filetype, great package manager you can launch, search, and install from right in the editor, and yes, occasionally even the mini-map, all keep me here.

There's a pervasive meme on HN that Sublime took off because of its lesser learning curve, and that if you're a professional programmer you should make the investment to learn vim and emacs. But this ignores that a lot of people who have already made that investment still find Sublime to be a better editor.

While I can understand the importance of using an open source editor, that particular argument doesn't sway me since I'm happy enough using Sublime for now. If it stops getting updates or whatever, I can always switch back to vim, but for now I will use what I feel is the best editor for the job.

Sublime took off cause it just works and it has a nice default color scheme and just enough batteries included to make it a functional programming environment for the 80% of programming situations. And it now has enough addons to increase quality of life in many areas and or solve the other 20% in many cases.

If I install emacs it is just okay. It probably has syntax highlighting, depending on the Linux distribution. It probably doesn't have any quality of life improvements for language X. I can drop in a theme and colorize it pretty quickly to my liking. From there, emacs is still very powerful, but there are a lot of things I really love for long and deep editing sessions when I am going through a lot of files on a code review or what not.

Don't forget: it can be arbitrarily extended in a popular programming language and it has an unrestricted free trial.

ST or Emacs?

ST. Python is the popular language. Elisp is... not popular. But you can do CL in emacs.

As an aside I found the Leo editor not too long ago. http://leoeditor.com/ -- one of the few editors that made me think "that is a little new". Leo is implemented in Python.

I wish there was a modern equivalent of emacs, only all Python. :)

Yuck. I prefer what Neovim did: editor comminicates using RPCs with arbitrary external programs using over a socket. Zero language lock-in and maximum extensibility.

Addendum: then again, you could use Python to do that.

> I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.

This sounds like the micro text editor. I've committed a few features to it and use it daily:

https://github.com/zyedidia/micro

You might be interested in checking it out.

I think you should forget the whole "terminal based" thing. TUI text editors don't make much sense anymore. Native GUIs are much less clunky and much more discoverable.

I wish people would learn to appreciate that UX is subjective. I find most GUI-based editors to be RSI inducing. The level of effort required to change that is not worth it for me. Others may disagree. And that's fine.

Just because it's a GUI doesn't mean you have to use the mouse. I find gvim much faster than vim in the terminal because it doesn't have to print a screen full of glyphs for each update.

On the other hand, vim + tmux is pretty awesome, and for that reason I prefer vim on the terminal. I've never particularly liked gvim, even if I'm not using tmux. In Linux, hitting the start or end of a buffer causes some sort of screen redraw that I've never been able to fix, but that might have to do with my configuration.

TUI still has advantages. Editing files over SSH is simpler, the app is easier to build cross platform, and for me personally the lack of a context switch when I'm in my terminal is nice. Even tiny little differences that keep you in your flow add up.

I use Emacs in both modes.

I have my development machine at Digital Ocean. My local machine is an under powered macbook air (underpowered now that I use lots of docker for development). I'll probably just get a tiny chromebook next as I just want a dumb terminal.

I run emacs over ssh/tmux. I love it, emacs never shuts down, all my shells run through emacs as well. I can use any machine with my sshkey and be back to work immediately. I can increase the size of the machine, have public access to my dev box if needed. If I have a bad internet connection it doesnt matter since its just sending low bandwidth over ssh. All the real bandwidth comes from DigitalOcean and is super fast.

I do pretty much the same but using mosh instead of ssh. It's really stable even on low bandwidth of crappy mobile connection.

Well let's not generalize on the clunky part; there's always Visual Studio ;-)

I would generally agree with your point, especially on the discoverability front - this is why emacs and vim have an often dreaded learning curve. But OTOH, there are also a couple of rather nice benefits to the terminal focus that I don't currently see in more GUI focused editors. It would certainly be doable to replicate them, but it seems like no one's trying currently.

So I would hold off on forgetting about the terminal until there's a viable alternative around.

Oh, and: I've seen my fair share of botched remote access solutions on the Windows side of things and would probably use any TUI editor short of ed over any IDE in those situations. At least SSH is responsive.

Check out kakoune, TUI based and very discoverable.

But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it.

I don't believe that. The people who snub Vim and Emacs, but are willing to sink time into learning new editors, new languages, and new frameworks have no excuse. If they were less susceptible to marketing, then they'd be able to learn something old every once in a while.

People have been attempting this for years with little success. The only projects I know of that have traction are Spacemacs and Neovim. The former is just an Emacs distribution and the latter is backwards compatible with Vim.

It is in fact possible to learn and KNOW Emacs and Vim and still prefer alternatives to either of them.

kakoune?

Kakoune doesn't run on Windows, so not cross-platform.

https://github.com/google/xi-editor

Current Status - from the readme:

This is still a project in its early stages. The Mac build has basic editing functionality (it was used to write this README), but looks very spare and is still missing essentials such as auto-indent. At the moment, it’s expected that its main community will be developers interested in hacking on a text editor.

Yeah, I'd love someone to make a text editor that is:

* simple and non-tedious to use by default,

* can run via terminal and ssh,

* supports vim themes,

* full support for Language Server Protocol,

---* (Can work with clangd)

* fast and polished

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