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Comment by thesnark | Hacker News Reader

I would be interested to hear what modern features are not possible in vim or emacs.

I'm curious as well. I'm able to do everything and more in Vim/MacVim that I was able to do in TextMate 1. Sure, it may not look like a "native" app, but I don't see how that should be an issue. You want to focus on the text, not the pretty box around the text.

Edited to add: Granted, a lot of the niceties have to be installed after the fact as a plugin, and are not built in. Where with Sublime Text 2, perhaps a lot of those things are there from installation.

Marco talked in Build & Analyze about loving multiple cursors, which I believe emacs/vim don't support: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5bPRhFHEz0

In VIM, you can edit multiple adjacent lines at the same time. You can place multiple cursors at random lines though and start editing. I think I saw a plugin for that once, though.

Did you mean to say “can't” in your second sentence?

Yes, sorry, wrote it in a hurry.

Some Emacs extensions that implement Sublime Text features (and IMHO are better than their ST equivalents): mark-multiple[1] and CUA (builtin) for multiple cursors, helm[2] (formerly "anything") for file selection that allows quick previewing (C-z) and much much more, mini-map[3], and expand-region[4] (not sure if this is inspired by a ST feature but it is nice nonetheless).

[1] https://github.com/magnars/mark-multiple.el

Video: http://emacsrocks.com/e08.html

[2] https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

[3] http://www.emacswiki.org/MiniMap

[4] https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el

Video: http://emacsrocks.com/e09.html

Something like that is also VERY easily accomplished with macros. The added benefit of macros is that you can then store that "edit" in case you need to replay it later.

In osener's reply to your comment, mark-multiple.el is mentioned; here is a talk from the developer that demonstrates using the feature many times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Te_a-AGqM

For my part, it wasn't so much that plugins weren't available as it was trying out multiple versions, installing them, configuring them, and troubleshooting them. Sometimes they'd make Vim much slower, or break altogether.

Much of what I wanted out of Vim worked right out of the box in ST2, and with minimal fuss.

Refactoring and intellisense. You can do those to some degree in vim, but eclipse and visual studio do it better.

I'm still using vim though, because i don't really need those features that often, and i feel handicapped in other editors.

Intellisense depends on the language. For C, C++ clang_complete is fantastic. For Javascript, Python, Ruby, there's also static analyzer based completion. IMHO Vim is pretty advanced there.

>I would be interested to hear what modern features are not possible in vim or emacs.

None technically.

There still isn't a very nice IDE/Analysis-refactoring engine for Java in Emacs, but there is one for Scala oddly enough.

So there are rough-edges, but the point is that Emacs is a programmable environment that belongs to you and the larger community, not to a solo absentee developer. You can make it do anything you want.

> ...but there is one for Scala oddly enough.

I don't think this is odd at all.

There is also one for OCaml and Haskell. (Well, maybe the Haskell one isn't as good, but I haven't tried it.) in my experience, far more functional programmers like Emacs/Vim and far more Java people like Eclipse/IDEA.

So in the Java version, the people who care over-much for IDE features already use an IDE and aren't going to spend time improving Emacs. In functional programming land, people are less worried about IDE features and so don't use IDEs. However, these features are nice, so people are willing to spend time writing backends like Ensime or TypeRex that can be plugged into Emacs.

Ensime is truly heavenly. <3

The cultural note seems to be more or less on point but I would make it less about Functional Programming than simply..."avant-garde".

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