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Comment by thecoffman | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the desire to have specialized editors for a specific language. If you want to go to a full blown IDE thats one thing - Eclipse and Visual Studio are powerful tools - but if you want to _edit_ code efficiently I don't understand why you wouldn't learn one editor very well and use it for all languages.

I personally am a vim guy but emacs, textmate, whatever, would be fine and they all work with clojure, ruby, python, c, and whatever the language du jour is tomorrow too.

Not that this isn't cool and I don't fault them for scratching a personal itch - its just an itch I don't have.

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> I've never understood the desire to...

My friend drives me crazy whenever he uses that phrase. He says stuff like: "I've never understood why people like kettle chips." - while I'm eating kettle chips! Sounds condescending. Yes, I am crazy for eating kettle chips. I make no sense whatsoever.

> I don't understand why you wouldn't learn one editor very well and use it for all languages.

If ruby is your preferred language, you could do that with Redcar, and enjoy the process of extending the editor.

This is very true and a valid point. If I didn't already know vim it would be a compelling argument for sure - but as I've already invested the time to learn it and it supports plugins written in ruby anyways there just isn't reason enough to switch for me. However - for someone who isn't already invested in an editor that wants that type of flexibility and wants to write extensions in ruby - this could very well be a winner!

Actually that is the situation I'm in. I was just about to jump into emacs after working mainly with Netbeans, and failing to make the switch to vim, but this actually looks really appealing to me.

You probably tried the no arrows method of switching to Vim. A piece of advice, just use it. Try to learn a few movements and commands each day as you need them, but keep using the editor as you used to use any other editor until you've learned enough of Vim. Baby steps and a week or two into it you will start to wonder how you lived without it.

I'll throw myself in as a datapoint here: I'm using vim exclusively for over 10 years and I still use the arrow keys to move around.

I just like it that way and never had a reason to re-train myself.

Don't force yourself into "best practices" needlessly. Find the way that works best for you - and get hacking!

This was not my experience. After a few months of Vim use, I was reasonably proficient. I timed myself doing basic editing tasks in both Vim (using keyboard motions) and Gedit (using the mouse). I was significantly faster in Gedit.

Double-click to select a word, triple-click to select a line. Just start typing to replace selected text. No conflation of cutting a string in to the clipboard and deleting it. Click-and-type editing is nice. I only use Vim when I want to reformat text with its macros.

I don't mean to be rude or patronizing (it's not my intention at all), but if you found getting the mouse and triple clicking to select a line instead of using 'Shift + V', and double clicking to select a word instead of something like 've', you where probably doing something very wrong. I realize that Vim is not for everyone, but to say you can be faster than what you could be in Vim using the mouse and Gedit sounds like total heresy to me! If you told me that you don't just don't like modal editors or that you where uncomfortable with the concept of motions and preferred the mouse - that would be the end of it and I would just acknowledge that (once again) Vim is not for everyone, but from what I read you never really got to a point where you where proficient enough with the editor to get significant ease and speed.

I've done the timing also and in some cases I've found that Vim gets me to where I want to be orders of magnitude faster, but seldom (if not ever) have I found it to be slower than a regular editor, perhaps with the exception of the most basic of basic editing needs (and even then Vim is probably faster).

Yes, but to use those Vim commands your cursor already has to be at the right place. The main thing that slowed me down with Vim was moving my cursor to the right place, not executing commands. Having a mouse makes it dead easy to move your cursor to the right place. I only gave double-clicking and triple-clicking as examples because I think clicking and dragging to highlight might be what slows down many click-and-type editor users.

I agree. I've never had the need to have an IDE for a specific language. I'm also a Vim guy, and though I've tried enough IDE's for a lifetime, I found the best IDE (for me at least) is a command line and Vim.

I think it's not that it's an IDE for a specific language, but an IDE written in a language that a lot of people would like to hack around in. So the value is in being able to write plugins or what not in ruby.

That being said, I haven't used it for anything more than peeking at it.

I love Eclipse. I get by with vim and gedit, but I prefer to have all the tools that Eclipse encompasses.

That being said, I have tried the dynamic languages plugin in Eclipse for Scala/Ruby/Python as well as PyDev and the performance is atrocious.

So if Redcar can be half as good as Eclipse, then I'm all for it.

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