Comment by snotrockets | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snotrockets | Hacker News Reader

I tried to like Sublime, I really did. Bought a license and used it for four months, before going back to Emacs.

Sublime is nice, and easy to extend, but it only extends so far, while Emacs is infinitely extensible.

You can practically live in Emacs[1]; some things I wanted to do in Emacs were hard to pull off, but I'm yet to find something it can't do. And it does so for years.

Fashionable editors come and go, but Emacs forever stands; and if there is one thing I don't think I'll be able to ever do again, is learn another set of editor shortcuts. Those I used were drilled there ~10 years ago, and I don't think they'll ever come out.

Also, author seems to take great deal about changing the editor theme and icon. Why should you ever care about that, outside a screenshot contest?

Editor should look good by rendering a nice font at a size you find comfortable, highlighted in colors you find easy on the eyes. If you look at the chrome, well, you're not spending enough effort editing.

[1] I'm not the one to start wars. vi might be just as good, but I'm not going to learn it this side of the river Styx.

What I'm about to say comes down more to philosophical differences than differences of opinion about Sublime Text 2.

I do not have extensive experience with Emacs. However, I've often heard it described as an infinitely extensible system, or as you put it "you can practically live in Emacs."

I find that a bit odd, because it's like building an OS inside an OS. I already have an infinitely extensible system, namely my actual OS (*nix). I want a tool that nicely fits within that system, not supplants it. And then I want that tool to be the best possible tool at what it is (in this case, a code editor). If I need other operations/actions, then I will use other tools.

The problem with this argument is that the OS doesn't provide you with the mesh that integrates all these tools together under a consistent interface. That's what Emacs and Emacs Lisp provide. I can jump from code to documentation to org-mode (todos) to music player to git... and all the while I'm switching from tool to tool, the shortcuts are the same, the graphical interface is the same, and I never need to change windows. An Operating System doesn't give you that seamlessness... the seams are all too visible.

Emacs was designed to work extremely well with Unix, or any other host operating system, and provide a way to easily gather tools (or fairly quickly replicate them in an os agnostic/portable manner) and provide a cohesive and expressive user interface to work with the output of those tools.

You find Emacs "a bit odd" because it's necessary to put in about a week of diligent study in, that's the barrier to entry, STUDY.

Other editors are just editors, that may or may not have extensions, Emacs is a textual environment.

If you look at it from the perspective of games, It's kind of the difference between Pac Man and Minecraft.

I suspect there is far more of a flavour of elitism in ones use of a text editor than any true benefit in real world productivity.

I tried ST2 to see what all the fuss was about. I still use it occasionally (mainly for its layout view on the right hand side), but Notepad++ is my main editor as ST2 has a particular problem that you can't toggle the reloading of a changed file.

I use Vim for huge files.

In any case, when I am programming I spend more time thinking than typing and unless I am doing heavy re-factoring of code, more powerful text editors are just a non issue for me.

By toggle do you mean change whether it reloads it?

Basically, yes, but with a prompt. Notepad++ will prompt you that a loaded file has changed and do you want to update it. ST2 will just load the file as soon as it realizes the file has changed.

The NP++ behaviour is ideal and a feature I use a lot. Unless something has changed very recently in ST2, there is no way to duplicate this behaviour. I believe there are some circumstances where ST2 will prompt you. IIRC if the file name has changed, but this is only part of the problem for me.

I, on the other hand, think that the ST behavior is ideal and Notepad++ is full of unneeded dialog boxes.

My favorite example is to use Zen Coding in both.

You could undo the reload.

It only reloads if you haven't made any changes to the file and you can disable it with plugins

What do you use to replace command-T in ST2 in Emacs? I recently picked up Emacs because I'm doing a clojure project (I can't get ST2 to work with nrepl) but I am having a hard time without the command-T fuzzy search.

I have ido and find-file-in-project installed but neither of them seem to include directories in the fuzzy search. So if I search 'custcore' it won't match 'customer/core.clj'. If I instead search 'core' it is too broad of a term. I really need very little out of an editor, but this is one of those things.

Try helm: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm and https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm-ls-git

Try projectile: https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile

It fills in the common project search and fuzzy filename search features(amount other things) and otherwise stays out of the way.

> [1] I'm not the one to start wars. vi might be just as good, but I'm not going to learn it this side of the river Styx

Of course you aren't, as long as it is one of the two editors you approve of.

I approve of anything that saves spaces and not tabs.

I'm just not going to use it, and keep wondering why one diverts so much efforts to editors that aren't the One True Editor.

I love Emasc but it can't even do proper full screen. I really wish ST3 has more APIs in the Emacs spirit, but keeping it modern.

  (defun full-screen ()
    "Indicate to the window manager that this frame should be full screen"
    (interactive)
    (x-send-client-message nil 0 nil "_NET_WM_STATE" 32 '(2 "_NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN" 0)))

That removes the borders? Any way, Unix only...

http://tomayko.com/writings/that-dilbert-cartoon

What's wrong with F11?

  (describe-key (kbd "<f11>"))

<f11> is undefined

Only on OSX maybe? It works perfectly on Windows, not sure about Linux as I'm too lazy to reboot and test right now. Perhaps someone else can check?

Did you use emacs starter kit? Because that binds fullscreen to F11.

It is unbound on linux as well (emacs24)

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