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Comment by kkowalczyk | Hacker News Reader

You should have checked out the project before ranting.

1. The major difficulty in writing an editor is in writing the editor core. He didn't write it from scratch but used existing ACE editor.

2. VIM is a huge mass of C code. Working on a huge mass of C code is ridiculously slow.

He's writing in JavaScript and using html for the UI - this is orders of magnitude faster.

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The last commit was 19 days ago, roughly when I installed it on this machine. The whole thing was a miserable joke at the time, with less than half of the "already implemented features" working. Either the author is slipping on his local commits or there hasn't been any progress in the last 3 weeks, JS/HTML or not, 10.000$ or not.

Meanwhile, the old and rusty Vim has had 39 patches pushed.

He's writing in JavaScript and using html for the UI - this is orders of magnitude faster.

In what sense is that true?

Faster for them to code with compared to C I would imagine.

Actually, the editor core is relatively easy. The hard part is adding all those 100s of little extra features you use every day. (Emacs ships with almost a million lines of extension code.)

Included in that million lines of code are two maybe three email clients, two IRC clients, org-mode (~100KLOC itself), tetris, and who knows what else.

I agree with your point, just not that the Emacs code base is a good reference of what's required to implement the numerous little text editing features people use every day.

"I use Emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor." -Neal Stephenson

"Don't get me wrong: Emacs is a great operating system–it lacks a good editor, though." -Unattributed

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