Those who do not understand Emacs are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. On a more serious note I could never understand why a closed source editor gained any traction among developers, especially when it lacks many, many features other more mature editors have had for years. Any Sublime users here that could provide their reasons for sticking with it?
Because most people are more concerned with what they are making, than spending time pissing about learning how to work out and set up an editor that has 40 year old UX. Things like VSCode and Sublime are clean and accessible, and allow you to start producing and coding quickly and painlessly.
Just because there's one obnoxious person doesn't mean you have to unnecessarily, and in this case, wrongly, insult a great tool. I'm a vim user and obviously don't have patience for typing alt-shift+, just to go to the beginning of a file but there are things emacs does well.
Now now, I use Emacs myself but I wouldn’t call its UX “refined”. It’s loads of stuff piled on top of eachother and many built-in packages to do the same thing (since everything had to be backwards compatible).
Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. I’ve never seen a serious emacs user without a heavy customised emacs. And I’ve never seen another emacs user whose config I would be nearly able to use :D
I can totally see why people like editors with sane defaults.
Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default.
As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this."
I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER
And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.
Hehe, thanks for the laugh! Yeah, I can totally relate. In fact, to become effective in Emacs I had to start by reading a book (Mastering Emacs, can totally recommend if you ever decide to try again!) and then spending _a lot_ of time fighting configurations. Even now that I’m very comfortable in Emacs I occasionally spend hours to just get a package working correctly (recently it was lsp-mode, which looks like the solution to many problems with Emacs, but I could never get it to work).
So yeah, I can’t really tell you it will be worth it productivity wise to learn Emacs, but for me it has gotten to the point that configuring it is a lot of fun and sort of replaces hobby programming projects for me.
I try occasionally because I'm pretty sure that eventually I would get to a place where Emacs would be astounding. (Or Vim, lest any partisans think I haven't given it a shot.) I just so far haven't quite gotten over that hill. But someday.
(Ironically, I spend most of my professional editing time -- which involves writing documentation in Markdown, not coding -- in BBEdit, because while there are a lot of coding editors that do more than it does, it has a few features for text slicing and dicing that I just haven't seen duplicated anywhere else.)
That might be true if you're an occasional developer but if you're putting in 8 hours a day for years you're going to want to have your tools tailored to you very closely.
Emacs is great, and Sublime has many drawbacks, as well as some poorly implemented features (like, the macros are basically worthless except for a very select few operations)... But Sublime Text simply outclasses any other Text Editor in the Simplicity + speed vs complexity.
Sublime's project goto functionality is simply unbeatable, it is faster than any Vim plugin I've ever used, it starts up faster than Emacs, it requires _no_ configuration to be a great text editor, it's the text-editor embodiment of easy-to-learn, hard-to-master.
Emacs is really something you need to actively learn, while you can just pick up Sublime and use it effectively within the first minute of opening it.
It's fast. Very fast. It can handle very large files without any trouble. I love the features provided by other editors, but when I need performance, I usually stick to Sublime and (neo)vim. vim can't handle large files, though.
I thought vim slows down only because it starts counting the number of lines as shown in the status bar. You could Ctrl-c and file becomes responsive but if you try to save huge file, I once got it truncated to some small part maybe because I quit the editor too early or something.
Why do people open very large files with a text editor? If it's a data file, you should grep/head/tail.
I can't say for others, but for me, Sublime was the quickest standalone editor that I can download, run, and open big files really fast. I haven't found the same speed with Atom or VSCode.
I think it's safe to say vim/emacs are different things than sublime/vs code/IntelliJ.
They're ok when there are no alternatives like during SSH session but I've given up customizing after 10 years to make them act like any of the latter ones.
Why would I pay for IntelliJ if I could or someone had already made easy to use plugin to just make them act like modern editors?
I mean, find the biggest file you can open with Vim, and then find the biggest file you can open with any other full-fledged editor. I doubt most full-fledged editor will be able to handle a 5GB+ log file, much less perform a search / replace within a reasonable amount of time.
Vim just has a lot less going on under the hood by default and
is built for this.
In short, I guess I'm agreeing with your original post. Vim is just on another level when it comes to performance versus other editors so it's kind of unfair to pit them together.
I actually was an Emacs user for many years and then switched to TextMate at first, then to Sublime.
The major reason back then was TextMate's and then Sublime's far superior support for editting files containing multiple syntaxes. While mmm-mode for Emacs eased the pain a while back then, it made Emacs slow down to a crawl sometimes and TextMate/then Sublime were also a lot easier to customize with regards to embedded languages without having to write elisp code all the time....
I was/am an emacs users since > 15y and for ~2 years i left Emacs for sublime text. Main reason, the performance and easy to setup without hacking my .emacsrc everyday.
Sure emacs is great and it has 10000x more features than anything else but ask yourself how much of them you really need and how convenient Emacs is at the end of the day ? I asked this myself and i came to the conclusion that i was better off a more recent editor. ST has a similar philosophy like vim and emacs and thats why i choose it.
Recently im trying VS Code but the performance is still somehow not fully convincing me.
I have tried to make the jump from Emacs to Sublime a couple of times, and more recently Emacs to VScode, but I always end up going back to Emacs.
Reading the recent discussions about the need to create commercial entities around open source projects, it occurred to me that Emacs has maybe suffered from not ever being commercialised. It is clearly the best code editor (very few people who master it ever leave it), but its steep learning curve and unreconstructed GUI mean that it remains inaccessible to too many developers. Maybe if a company was created around the product its sales, marketing and documentation would improve, and more people would use it.
Because Emacs/Vim are NOT good citizens in any OS. Them live in their own sub-world of the terminal. Simply things like "exit" are weird incarnations on them.
Sublime work well across the main OS, live in their world, have no funky weird crazy ways to work (ie: work as expected without retraining for that funky weird crazy sub-world).
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P.D: I not dislike the terminal, and wish all OS have not 3 competing GUIS (Web,Native, Terminal) but just 2 (so a terminal editor is a native editor, a native paint app is a native terminal app) but that is a pipe dream because the terminal is stuck in the past.
