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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

I haven't used emacs so I won't speak to that. But a GUI editor (be it Sublime, Notepad++, VSCode, JetBrains, whatever) does everything vim does and is far easier and more pleasant to use. I think that using vim instead of a GUI editor is kind of like using a hand saw instead of power tools - you can do it, but you're willingly giving up a better option for a worse one. Vim made sense in a day when computers were based around text terminals, but we don't live in that day any more and it doesn't make sense to use tools that are limited by that paradigm any more.

For serious work, a GUI editor (Sublime is my choice) beats the pants off vim. The only situation I use a terminal editor is when I'm editing config files on servers, and vim sucks at that too - nano is far superior for quick and dirty edits to files. I simply do not think there's a use case where vim makes sense any more.

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Both Vim and Emacs have GUIs. Emacs can even render your PDFs and webpages, you can have svg icons displayed while browsing directories.

I'm used to vim, editing in anything else is anything but pleasant. It's subjective. It's not about speed or anything. I think slower than I type, so the bottleneck is not my editing speed. But ergonomically it's more pleasant for me to use. Because I barely have to move my hands, and it has very powerful movements.

Neovim beats the pants off Sublime any day. Vim modal editing is the definition of power tools - you have it exactly backward. But like any powerful tool, it needs training.

That's not true. Anything modal editing can do, I can do with Sublime Text, and some things I can do, for example having thousands of cursors simultaneously adding code, can't be done in Vim. If you know how to use your tools, they are power tools.

You will say... oh but my fingers are in the home row! It doesn't matter. I can use the cursor keys just as fast and without having to look at the keyboard, their spatial positions are burned into my brain. And I don't need to change modes to use them! Your way is not superior to my way.

However, the point of all this discussion is that Lisp doesn't provide good enough language servers for modern editors, so Vim and Emacs integration is much better. And that's an orthogonal issue to the fact that some editors allow you to do things one way or another.

> However, the point of all this discussion is that Lisp doesn't provide good enough language servers for modern editors,

They use the "language server" model since a long time, before Microsoft's LSP existed. Thus the need isn't really there, unless one wants to develop with Microsoft products (or similar) and get the needed extensions for Lisp into those Microsoft driven standards. If there were a real need and a real benefit, there would be some better adoption on the Lisp side.

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