> 17 years ago

"Nearly half my age," said Emacs.

Wait is Emacs lying about its age again?

Emacs was released in 1985. That's 36 years ago. Half of that is 18. What am I missing?

> Initial release 1976; 45 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

I think GNU Emacs was released in 1985, but Emacs existed before that. Similar to vim and vi relationship.

In fact, Emacs was first implemented as a plugin (a set of macros in the language of the time) for a now forgotten editor called Teco, which was one of the first, if not the first, programmable editor ever.

That's the "macs" in Emacs: Editing MACroS.

I was using Emacs in 1982, and it had been around for several years before that.

I love it when old-timers weigh in on HN comments.

What do you use these days?

Started with Gosmacs. Working in the CMU graduate terminal room with the man himself. I was just a freshman undergraduate, but a graduating student gifted a coveted X1 key to me. Mostly coveted due to the coke machine.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

What a wonderfully entertaining read that was :)

Sounds like the culture in the CMU CS department was pretty great.

Thank you for sharing this historical gem with us.

not OP, but Emacs ofc [1]

[1] why on earth would they go through the traumatic change of reprogramming their muscle memory after so many years? it would be like a wizard that voluntarily gives their power away. like a father sacrificing his own child.

Also, conversely whom Emacs is attracting these days. One interesting data point i came across is this philosophy dude protesilaos.com/ . Amazing youtube videos on Emacs and he has unique view from the point of philosopher for Emacs.

Emacs of course ;)

Gosh, "old timer" :(

Apologies for my poor choice of wording!

Here in South Africa we typically use "old-timer" to refer to someone who is very experienced.

My comment was expressed with the utmost respect I assure you :)

I didn't take it as a derogatory label. My emoji was just my own self reflection on the years gone by.

edlin

Why fix what ain't broke? /s

GNU Emacs was released in 1985. Other variants of Emacs date back to the 70s.

Apparently, the downvote restriction to wise users doesn't prevent some of them from being trigger happy. Maybe the release date stated above is wrong but I'm shocked to see this kind of comment downvoted.

are we off by one ?

Today I thought I was learning I’m older than emacs, but learned I’m only barely younger and that’s just fine for me.

To think I was still using Eclipse a scant 7 years ago...

I started off with Eclipse in school, I still stash all of my code in a folder called 'workspace' as a result.

But, I've since switched to intellij for Java (and later, lightweight editors like Sublime Text for JS, until a while later JS finally got modules and editors added more support for JS), and nowadays I'm using it for everything; I'm currently managing a 200KLOC application (it's too much but my employer isn't hiring, sigh) in at least four languages (JS, PHP, TS and Go, it's an older application and a rebuild I'm working on), and intellij has no qualms with it whatsoever.

I even set it to PHP 5.2 mode so it warns me when I try to use `[]` to initialize an array.

Ack...that's some old PHP

Oh wow, Eclipse.. That reminds me, I was using Netbeans eons ago (2010 more precisely xD). For this reason, I'm using the Netbeans key mappings in all my editors. I kinda feel bad for those editors, and I hope they still have an active user base, but oh well, it's survival of the fittest I guess.

Ah, someone else !

I live in fear they will be removed from PyCharm - every time I update one of the Jetbrains editors and the Netbeans bindings aren't there, I'm lost.

Don't worry too much about it. It will take 1-2 weeks of excruciating pain, changing your muscle memory, but that's it.

Remember, people learn dvorak after a life time of qwerty... and I'm sure they aren't (all) masochists.

Your comment reminded me that I have now been writing code for about a decade, as I used Netbeans as my first IDE in high school.

I still use it. I always hear these raving praises for IntelliJ so I guess I have to force myself to move to IntelliJ. I tried a couple of times, but always fell back to Eclipse due to familiarity.

What do you think is the biggest difference between the two?

I suggest giving IntelliJ a shot but, honestly, if you prefer Eclipse then stick with it. I originally switched because at the time IntelliJ had better code navigation, better version control support, better static analysis support, and an overall much better aesthetic IMO (especially in dark mode). Things might have improved in Eclipse since then, but I haven't tried it in a long time. I think the last Eclipse version I used was Juno.

I do a lot more Python work than Java nowadays so I use PyCharm much more than IntelliJ, though they share a lot in common. Aside from those, the only IDE I really ever use is GNAT Studio for work. I suppose I used Android Studio for a while, but that's basically just IntelliJ with some Android-specific features bolted on.

I was forced to use Eclipse for a while ~2010, never liked it.

It's funny to look at how many editors one comes across over the years. My first one was Borland C++ as a kid. Then came a mix of Visual C++ and Bloodshed Dev C++ during high school. During university I tried a bunch of things but mainly nano, gedit, Visual Studio, and Eclipse. In my early career (2013) I finally got into Vim and haven't looked back since.

I did try out Rider a little over a year ago. It was really good and I'm impressed with some of its features. But it wasn't enough to make me switch.

There's an official Vim plugin by Jetbrains for all Jetbrains IDEs (including Rider).

I find it a great way to combine the strengths of Vim with the strengths of a full IDE.

Here's another vouch for IdeaVIM. It's got 99% of the VIM that I use, and is actively developed.

Trying to cry in eclipse editor, but its not responding :(

I’ve been using IntelliJ since version 2. :-) My favorite developer tool of all. Cheers!

This comment just makes me angry to think about all the time I wasted using Eclipse without knowing that a better alternative existed.

I feel bad for leaving Eclipse. It was exceptional at the time, with its partial-class compiler, you could execute the JUnit on it even if the rest didn’t compile, something IntelliJ still refuses.

oh god, I never knew how much I needed a scrollbar gutter for search results. So great.