Comment by G3rn0ti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by G3rn0ti | Hacker News Reader

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> I’ve also seen plenty of new editors rise and fall in the past 20 years - Komodo, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. Emacs and vim are the only editors that stood the test of time

This is the main reason I keep using Emacs for my everyday use. I never thought it was simply the best editor you could imagine. But it’s an editor I could always rely on.

There have been so many editors and IDEs in the past with their shiny features, great UIs and everybody screaming of excitement — until they were replaced by the next new shiny editor after a couple of years.

VSCode is surely a nice editor. (Although I don’t think its pixel dust UI is particularly great. And don’t get me started on its memory consumption.) Microsoft’s LSP, however, is a great idea. Emacs absorbed this feature already and will make it available even long after everybody stopped using VSCode within a couple of years.

Editors fall out of fashion. People die. Emacs remains Emacs.

VS code has been my standby for years but the number of times it wants to restart for updates drives me up a wall, and what do I get for allowing constant updates? A giant modal popup [0] asking if I trust a folder enough to let VSC run automated scripts. Yes it’s configurable but i value default setups so I can more easily wipe my OS without reconfiguring everything.

I watched a video on JetBrains [1] and the keyboard shortcuts and navigation look genuinely well thought out, so I’ll be giving that a try (with a vim emulation plugin, naturally)

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/126310

[1] https://youtu.be/x8y_6Gg28GI

I live in Intellij, it has it's own minor warts but it's a superpower compared to anything else I've used.

It covers everything (code, inspections, docker, database layer, seamless multilanguage support).

Except for -really- big projects, like the linux kernel. Its indexing is.. not fun.

> This is the main reason I keep using Emacs for my everyday use.

This might be my number two reason. I learned Emacs in 2000. Meanwhile, I've not had to learn, over and over again, all those other editors and IDE's. To be sure, I've honed my Emacs skills, installed and learned new tools in it (hello flycheck, elpy, SLIME, org-mode, TRAMP, CEDET), and just generally get on with whatever I'm working on ATM.

My number one reason has been the power though, especially after reading things like this: https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-e...

Not all old, unfashionable editors are dead, though. See WordStar, for example. And people definitely still use all of the editors in your "fallen" list to get work done.

I use a mix of editors on a day-to-day basis because they each solve a particular problem in a way I like. I imagine everyone else has a similar thought process. If you like the way it works, then it's the editor for you.

Are we talking the 1980s word processor WordStar??

Yes. But no worries, Emacs got you covered, too:

http://web.mit.edu/Emacs/source/emacs/lisp/emulation/ws-mode...

George R. R. Martin apparently still uses WordStar 4.0 for DOS to write his novels.

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