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Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

I've certainly been down that rabbithole.

Started with Vim, planned on eventually learning Emacs (still do), and then to whatever editor was "flavor of the month", including TextMate and Sublime Text.

Sublime Text was great in it's day, and i still hold a license for the latest version, but it is caught in a death spiral it seems. Whenever i check if it "does X", it turns out it maybe does, but VS Code has a much better plugin than ST ever did.

And so, after a couple of decades, i appear to have come full circle, and now mostly use Vim again, unless a task requires "specific tools", i.e. writing Azure Functions, which is much easier to handle in Visual Studio or VS Code.

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I currently settle on Emacs (again) after three years of NeoVim. LSP is so much better integrated and works for my needs out of the box. I currently don't miss treesitter, expect for semantic selections at point.

But I realized I could get rid of a massive and ever changing NeoVim configuration mess. Using Emacs 29 though.

Tree-sitter for emacs: https://emacs-tree-sitter.github.io/

Not as good as neovim, but does a good job with the syntax highlighting...

I'm locked in emacs (joke intended).

But I must admit that my rust/LSP experience with Emacs doesn't hold 5 seconds in front of what I've just seen on the Zas website...

> my rust/LSP experience with Emacs doesn't hold 5 seconds in front of what I've just seen on the Zas website

My preferred way of working after 20+ years in the industry, is finding the "best tool" for the job.

Vim is my "goto" editor for everything that doesn't have a better tool, but any perceived performance gain from being familiar with an editor needs to be compared to the performance gains of using the specialized tool.

I.e. Writing Azure Functions, VS Code / Visual Studio makes this dead simple with integrated local Azure Storage emulation and more. It can be done in other editors, but i'd spend a lot of time on tooling instead of just writing code.

I guess i've just gotten more pragmatic with time :)

My 35+ years experience (ah ah!) tells me that emacs is the best :-)

Just kidding... I code small stuff nowadays, so emacs is just fine. But if I had to get into something big, I'd certainly use a tool with powerful and fast code navigation, and something that works out of the box. LSP mode on emacs is not easy to set up. I mean, you can get it 90% working in 15 minutes, sure, but then come the little things such as: you're waiting for your LSP server to start, pop up windows actually don't pop up, the LSP hints don't update themselves unless you save your file, sometimes they take 3+ seconds for update (an eternity when you type code), I still don't know how to jump from a stack trace to the code, etc. So yep, refactoring is there, navigation is there, much is there but it's not super tightly packaged...

But for other things, emacs is just cool. Small python scripts, R code, org mode, git stuff,...

Org mode was my main "excuse" for keeping Emacs around, but these days i've more or less given up using it due to lack of decent mobile clients.

Instead i've more or less settled on Obsidian for my notes, which does 99% of what i used org-mode for, and i use other tools for the last 1%. The only thing i'm missing is a good (integrated) solution for task and time tracking/reporting.

I'm aware that PlainOrg (https://plainorg.com/) exists, but i've already moved my notetaking workflow to Obsidian, and i'm deeply entrenched in modules with that, so moving now would probably not accomplish much.

Somewhat ironically, the best Org-mode plugin i've found for "other than Emacs" editors is for Sublime Text : https://github.com/ihdavids/orgextended

That Sublime plugin is definitely the best implementation I've seen outside Emacs. That's pretty good.

Did you try Beorg on mobile?

I think it depends on the language server - metals for Scala, jdtls for Java, pyright for python,jstls for Javascript/Typescript and omnisharp-roslyn for c# are all pretty good. Cold startup time for lsp servers in bigger languages (scala/java/c#) are akin to IntelliJ/Rider import times.

I don't have all the same refactorings as intellij, but then I don't have to pay a license to edit c# code, either. Most people that I watch use IntelliJ don't use it to its fullest extent. I will open it to pair with other IntelliJ users. But I'm faster in emacs. I've also used it professionally for almost twenty years. To get me to switch an ide would have to be as extensible, keyboard centric, cheap (both free and in terms of memory usage), and portable (across platforms and languages) as emacs has been.

That's a tall order.

With Evil? is it any good?

Evil is the best vim outside of vim. Been using vim a few decades, and I do not miss anything with evil...

You might enjoy Spacemacs. For me, it combines the benefits of both Vim and Emacs. https://www.spacemacs.org

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