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Comment by spacemanaki | Hacker News Reader

Vim and Emacs weren't enough?

Emacs is a fantastic editor (and I think I can say that I am what you call a power user), but Emacs Lisp is a terrible, terrible language. The more I use it, the more I hate it. And it's not because of the lispiness or parens -- Common Lisp was my Language of Choice for many years.

Having an editor that I could extend in a real programming language (and JS is actually very nice once you grasp stuff like prototype inheritance and learn to avoid the... uhm, bad parts) would be simply awesome. And if it was pretty and integrated with OS X I would be willing to pay hard cash for it.

If Node.js were to get a little bit of language agnosticism (write code and source debug in Coffeescript and anything else that treats Javascript as a compiler target) then you'd have programmable-editor nirvana for web developers.

Vim supports scripting with MzScheme, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, and Lua.

Show me a usable file tree view that doesn't look like crap for vim or emacs, and I will go back to using them.

With today's web frameworks, when I hop between files all the time, I want a neat visual file tree.

Fair enough I guess, although "doesn't look like crap" is pretty subjective. Based on the number of "switching to Vim" blog posts (some on OS X) submitted to HN over the past few months, I would say the old editors are still putting up plenty of competition.

What's wrong with Nerdtree? Just its looks?

I find it much more useful than the file trees in any of the gui editors I've tried. You don't need to leave your keyboard and you can create, delete and move files directly from the tree which some gui editors don't even allow you to do. If you haven't tried it give it a shot.

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