Hacker News Reader

Comment by diminish | Hacker News Reader

After seeing TextMate struggle around the jump from version 1 to 2 and yesterday reading Sublime Text to struggle going from version 2 to 3 (to 4) I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors. Maybe it's time to hold stronger to your emacs, (or vi).

View on HN

I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity.

> I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity.

To amplify your comment: I'm going on 33 years, and one of the great things about emacs is how it has changed with the times.

>I'm going on 33 years

Your comment made me realize I'm about the same (ouch.)

I started on TECO EMACS on a DEC-20, then Gosling Emacs on Unix, then GNU Emacs on Unix, then various mini-emacs on PCs, finally back to GNU Emacs.

>how it has changed with the times

Heh, even a glacier will surprise you.

I'm a vi user, having learned it when I had to admin dozens of flavours of *NIX in the 90s.

I moved to Windows ten years ago for my day job, and had to use many editors which didn't support vi keybindings, so ended up learning to work with only the keys on the PC keyboard.

This has worked out quite well, as these days I have vi keybindings in some Windows apps (thanks ViEmu!), but when they're not available, I can fall back to 'no help' mode and still be comfortable enough with most editing tasks.

Still more<esc>bimuch <esc>ea productive with vi keys!

>more<esc>bimuch <esc>

Don't you mean "bcw"? ;)

His would be: Still much more productive with vi keys!

Yours would be: Still much productive with vi keys!

Derp, you're right. It seems I can't English this morning. :)

>I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors [such as Textmate].

I'm not afraid. After 22.5 years on Gnu Emacs, I'm considering a jump to Textmate 2.

(I probably would not be considering a jump, however, without the boost to sustainability caused by Textmate 2's having been open-sourced. ADDED: also, being able to edit files on remote hosts is not important to me.)

I gave Sublime Text a shot (20 years emacs), but ran into the same thing that has kept me from using emacs x11 for more than a few weeks at a time, which is that I spend maybe 30% of my time editing files on remote machines, connected over ssh, often through complicated tunneling arrangements that make using Tramp a pain to use.

I keep thinking that what I really need is to switch all the machines I use to Plan9 to abstract away the remote sessions, I guess then I'd have to learn Acme :)

I've had trouble using Emacs to edit remotely via SSH/tramp, but the following ~/.ssh/config settings helped me a lot:

  # stop ssh connections from freezing
  KeepAlive yes
  ServerAliveCountMax 10
  ServerAliveInterval 10
  
  # Lets you bounce through an arbitrary number of hosts.
  # ex: ssh 1sthost/2ndhost/3rdhost
  Host */*
  ProxyCommand ssh $(dirname %h) nc -w1 $(basename %h) %p

Reply on news.ycombinator.com