Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_ | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Text editors constantly come and go. And that's no bad thing, but for those of us just wanting to edit some text: what do we do? The design goal of these projects is always to be better than what's currently available, which sounds great, and then, 5 years later, development has stalled, and the community is gone. Meanwhile Emacs is still going.

The features of this thing all sound decent enough, but there's no source code, and it doesn't run on Windows, and it doesn't run on macOS, and scripting is "coming soon" - I wonder if that scripting will end up even half as good as Emacs's programmability. I bet it won't.

I have been here before. And that is exactly why I continue to use Emacs, even though it is a bit weird. I bet I will still be using Emacs in 2035, and I bet this thing will be long dead.

(I bet based on the odds. Time will tell.)

View on HN

Switching editor every five years doesn't sound that bad? Especially if you really get a new editor which is "better than what's currently available".

But I don't especially want to switch text editor every 5 years!

Besides, the clock starts ticking from day 1, so if you want the full lifespan then you'll need to start using it while it's still half-baked and buggy and has no ecosystem to speak of. And that means you'll spend a lot of time using it when the goal of "better than what's currently available" remains firmly unrealized (for all that it may have some key item of interest that's caught your attention). Or you could start using it later, once things are properly going, and then I'd expect your experience would be a bit more like mine, before I finally bit the bullet in 2006 or whenever it was and sat down to teach myself how to actually use this Emacs thing, and you'll be finding yourself having to switch after more like 2-3 years.

Still, this is no immutable law of nature, as Visual Studio Code (9 years old) shows. And of course, Emacs and vim themselves - along with a number of other less famous FOSS options - would never have got this far if every editor automatically died off after year 5.

Nevertheless, my bet stands.

> and scripting is "coming soon" - I wonder if that scripting will end up even half as good as Emacs's programmability. I bet it won't.

For any application that intends to be scriptable, it's difficult to add scriptability on after the MVP.

The best approach is to build an MVP that takes commands, which means that scripting has to be there before any other feature, including modifying text.

his is why Emacs and Vim are so ergonomic to modify - the base system is a scriptable environment on which the editor was built.

IOW, if you're building a programming editor, you should be doing "create REPL, use REPL to create editor", not "create editor, then try to throw REPL on top of it".

> his is why Emacs and Vim are so ergonomic to modify - the base system is a scriptable environment on which the editor was built.

This is more an Emacs than Vim thing. GNU Emacs was scriptable from the start, while VimScript was added in Vim v5 (when Vim had been around for 7-8 years). Most of Vim was from the beginning written in C with a scripting language and plug-in system being afterthoughts.

I think the difference from other editors is just that these afterthoughts have still had decades to mature by now :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com