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Comment by mnemonicsloth | Hacker News Reader

Vim and Emacs are 20+ years old and still popular. They're still around precisely because they're really good tools for transforming source code.

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Not really. As much as I love vim and Visual Studio, I use them because there's nothing better.

I'd love something better (maybe someday I'll care so much that I'll sit down and write it myself).

Uh? I don't know about vim, but emacs doesn't even get syntax highlight right for most languages.

It's a great text editor, and I appreciate it as such, but it understands way too little of programming languages other than Lisp to deserve being called an IDE.

Emacs doesn't really come with out-of-the-box great support for most languages. Even for one language there are usually several alternative modes available, from which you have to choose. Even for Lisp you probably want to consider SLIME instead of the default.

Unfortunately not every popular language has a truly great mode available. And the whole mode-ecosystem feel like a pita (especially for newcomers), but at least you have a choice, which you don't have with most other editors/IDE-s.

But your talk about syntax highlighting is just unfair. I for example use a JavaScript mode written by Steve Yegge, which actually contains a full-blown JavaScript parser which pretty much ensures that under normal circumstances I don't make syntax errors. Oh... and it also has syntax highlighting :)

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