Re:Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim/Emacs if you're doing we...
by nextos on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @10:09AM
(#20155527)
I'll be a bit provocative and say they are things in 3 different categories that just overlap a bit in the class of text editors.
VSCode is an open-source and slimmed down version of a really good IDE, Visual Studio. It's a great choice for developing with MS tools like C# or F#.
Vim is an extension of Vi, which is mostly a set of primitives for manipulating text. As an implementation, I think Vim is not good. Vimscript shows its age. But this can be forgiven because the text manipulation primitives are so good. Vi, and to a lesser extend Vim, try to outsource everything that is not strictly text manipulation.
Emacs is a text-mode Lisp VM. Since (mostly) everything is text-oriented, it happens to have great editing facilities. But this should not distract you from the main fact. It's a platform. And it has high-quality applications (Org, Notmuch, Magit, Calc, Dired...) plus lots of libraries. Most importantly, applications can easily talk to each other in Lisp.
After more than a decade hopping around different environments, I decided computing is better done in 3 platforms. Emacs (for nearly everything), a web browser (just for hypertext) and a terminal (to deal with plumbing, Unix in my case). I've tied everything together with a tiling WM. I find it is a lot saner than using little CLI or GUI silos.
VSCode is an open-source and slimmed down version of a really good IDE, Visual Studio. It's a great choice for developing with MS tools like C# or F#.
Vim is an extension of Vi, which is mostly a set of primitives for manipulating text. As an implementation, I think Vim is not good. Vimscript shows its age. But this can be forgiven because the text manipulation primitives are so good. Vi, and to a lesser extend Vim, try to outsource everything that is not strictly text manipulation.
Emacs is a text-mode Lisp VM. Since (mostly) everything is text-oriented, it happens to have great editing facilities. But this should not distract you from the main fact. It's a platform. And it has high-quality applications (Org, Notmuch, Magit, Calc, Dired...) plus lots of libraries. Most importantly, applications can easily talk to each other in Lisp.
After more than a decade hopping around different environments, I decided computing is better done in 3 platforms. Emacs (for nearly everything), a web browser (just for hypertext) and a terminal (to deal with plumbing, Unix in my case). I've tied everything together with a tiling WM. I find it is a lot saner than using little CLI or GUI silos.