Episode 3 – IDEs vs Editors
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Recorded Nov 2007 (yes that long ago)Our third episode is about a topic near and dear to every developer: what editor to develop with and why it’s far superior than the piece of crap someone else uses. Alex, Craig and Marc chat about everything from Eclipse/Textmate to vim/emacs. It’s a sensitive topic for most, and we went into this podcast knowing we wouldn’t convince each other to stray from our weapon of choice, but we managed to fill about 45 minutes discussing some of the finer points of editing and being productive.
I think this podcast – more so than the others – represents most accurately three developers sitting around drinking beer and talking shop. When we go out to the pub (sadly) this is exactly the type of conversation we (and if you’ve made it to the third episode, probably you too) have.
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I think Vim won that one. ^^
I doesn’t have to be “IDEs vs. Editors”, though. Visual Studio + ViEmu is probably an unbeatable combination. If you’re into Emacs, there’s Viper and vimpulse.el.
I’ve fully switched to Vim since recording that podcast. I’m ready to concede defeat that Vim is the best
For my current configuration you can check out: http://github.com/marcjeanson/vimconfig
I had tried viper out way way back and wasn’t impressed. Not sure about vimpluse.el. Not sure I’d use “unbeatable” and Visual Studio in the same sentence, although resharper is pretty good
I used to use emacs with visual studio using some add-on that I can’t remember at the moment. It was OK, but less than optimal.
In the end, I think it’s weird and a bit sad that the best editors (Vi/Emacs) were created in the 70′s and we haven’t figured out a better way yet.
So you migrated from TextMate to Vim? That’s fascinating. (TextMate, after all, borrows heavily from both Emacs and Vim.)
In what ways did you find TextMate lacking?
I think there’s a tendency to overemphasize “newer is always better” in the software world. It’s far more important that something stands the test of time, in my opinion …
What does Textmate borrow from Vim? I see the comparison with Emacs, but not sure I see it with Vim.
My editor “timeline” over say the last 10 years goes sorta goes like this (definitely missing a few):
pico ->Ultraedit -> Emacs -> VisualAge Smalltalk -> JBuilder -> Emacs -> VS6 -> Emacs -> VS.NET -> Emacs -> Eclipse -> Textmate -> Emacs -> Vim
Although I usually used Vim for quick editing files in linux, I never really made it my “development environment” full time. Every time I tried in the past, I just kept going back to Emacs.
So what made me stay this time?
-The fuzzyfinder plugin which lets me switch files and buffers quickly is a great Textmate replacement for comamnd – T
-Nerdtree is a good source tree explorer
-A bunch of plugins from Tim Pope like rails.vim, and surround.vim are just too useful for me not to use it.
-The general multi-mode Vi awesomeness.
Textmate’s lack of split windows always caused me to keep looking at other editors.
One thing that Textmate did do though is kick all the other editors in the ass for a bit causing them to add things like snippets etc.
I think the biggest mistake they are making is not releasing Textmate 2. There are a lot of people in the Rails community at least that have switched to Emacs or Vim, and I don’t see them coming back.
The biggest reason though for switching is that I have to switch every once in a while. It’s a running joke around here that I can’t use the tools for too long. We’ll see how long Vim lasts
Well, for one thing, Emacs and Vim have quite a lot in common — if you look past the fact that one is modal and the other modeless. E.g., they both have incremental search, they both offer auto-indentation instead of having you mess with tabs or spaces manually, they both distinguish between buffers and windows, they both select text without Shift (transient mark mode is to Emacs what visual selection mode is to Vim), and so on and on. What’s curious about this list of similarities between Emacs and Vim is that it’s often also a list of how Emacs/Vim differs from the rest, such as the notepadish shareware editors on Windows. There’s a trans-Emacs-Vim awesomeness (perhaps rooted in constructive competition between the editors) which generally isn’t available outside Emacs or Vim.
Until TextMate came along, one might say, and picked up on it.
Whether I’m simplifying or not, I think I have a point that much of TextMate’s “Emacs features” are also readily available in Vim. (I note that the same is often true of the “Emacs features” that TextMate lacks, such as split windows.) TextMate’s line-wise handling strikes me as particularly vi-ish, though, like copying the current line without a selection. Emacs doesn’t have anything like that out of the box (it prefers to work with sexps); vi was always better at handling single lines than Emacs.
Perhaps the community dwindles when TextMate 2 is delayed, but I don’t think it will matter once it’s released. Large amounts migrated from Emacs and Vim to the first version; if the next is even better, more switching is to be expected.