Good grief. Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community, and no one is predicting that they will regain market share.

And back to the original article, live programming and rich editing experiences is the future; emacs and VIM will go the way of the typewriter and x-terminal.

    Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since
    the 90s as a percentage of the developer community

The quality of the developer community seems to have gone down since the 90s. Maybe the OP should have stated "Eventually every great developer's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position." At least, this has been my experience.

     live programming and rich editing experiences is the future

I was previously assured that VPLs were the future.

"The quality of the developer community seems to have gone down since the 90s."

Really? Can you back this up? As it seems to me the community is more engaged, productive and delivering high quality code. Yes, there's a lot more bad code as well, but that seems to be proportional to the increase in developers.

>The quality of the developer community seems to have gone down since the 90s. Maybe the OP should have stated "Eventually every great developer's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position." At least, this has been my experience.

To quote Jack Churchill (during WII) "any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly armed."

> I was previously assured that VPLs were the future.

They are. Its just that we are getting the VPL features that we want (live programming and rich editing experiences) in editors for our textual languages instead.

And in my day penny sweats only cost a penny!

Right. Who uses terminals these days?! Except just about every developer I know.

I use terminals, but not dumb terminals. I use terminal emulators on a modern OS on which I am able to install any editor I want. I have emacs/vim installed, but I use them maybe once every few months. There are better editors for what I do.

Disclaimer: Every is defined as not including a lot of developers on Microsoft platforms, web developers, Java Enterprise developers etc ...

Parent did qualify that with "every developer I know." We tend to live in bubbles and don't see the big picture. Like "everyone I know programs in C++" is definitely true in some circles.

How many of us use x-terminals these days? I was referring to the hardware, not the emulation program. Perhaps parent lives in a world where they have a bunch of surplus DEC or HP X terminals and haven't moved on to PCs yet. Or perhaps parent just misunderstood my comment.

Maybe I did. Sorry about that. I meant terminal emulators available in most modern GUIs.

The Devs I know are predominantly on Windows, but they still use terminals. Some use CMD terminals on Windows, some use Putty on some remote Linux box. Some use Cygwin. And then there are a few Linux/OSX people who mostly use the graphical terminals native to their platform.

embedded...

>> Emacs and VIM use has actually been going down since the 90s as a percentage of the developer community

My Google-Fu is coming up short, i can't corroborate this. Can you provide any links to data confirming this claim up?

I took a stab at getting some stats by searching stack overflow / server fault / super user for vim questions, emacs questions, textmate and sublime, vim comes out top by a long way, emacs next, the other 2 are a rounding error.

No surprise that there are lots of questions about VIM, it has a really sharp learning curve. You didn't include Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc...which is a significant omission.

This is all informal and anecdotal, but I'll try to explain my reasoning/experience. In the mid/early 90s, you weren't really a great programmer unless you used a real text editor, so we would all eventually evolve into using Emacs (or VIM for the more daring). But then in 1997, Visual Studio got support for code completion (in VB), and Java and even C++ eventually followed. These language editors improved productivity for programming in those languages so much that it was hard to be competitive staying on Emacs. So perhaps most (~90%) of the Java/C#/C++ code written today is done with a well supported language aware editor (Eclipse, Visual Studio, JetBrains, ...).

Of course, if you are programming in a dynamic language, or a language with lousy tool support (C), then the language-aware editor doesn't really give you much (no static type system --> no static type feedback). There is a greater chance you are programming in Emacs (or VIM), but then you might not want to bother with the learning curve, or you might want something with a more modern non-ASCII UI, so maybe you are programming in Sublime or TextMate. There is nothing really wrong with this, you can be a great developer and prefer to avoid UX-archaic tooling, especially if you happen to also be a strong designer. There are strong trends away from text-based tools to visual tools, and I have no reason to believe that this isn't at play here.

The emacs community is vocal, and is particularly magnified in my field (systems/PL/PhD-level computer science) and demagnified at my place of employment (Microsoft, though keep in mind MSR has lots of Emacs/VIM users). But look at what the students prefer: they have no patience to learn these weapons from a more civilized time. They'll take whatever is the path of least resistance, and honestly who blames them!? Its not like they are losing much.

>> UX-archaic

Why then, in circa 40 years, have we still not managed to find a better alternative?

I can't help drawing parallels with windows / unix in the 90s and more so 00s. Yes, a point and click GUI is much easier to wing it with than a CLI, but, it doesn't deliver nearly as much power to the user as a proper CLI with a small number of reusable tools that can be composed to solve many problems.

To give a concrete example, if the GUI designer of your chosen deployment tool didn't imagine anyone would want to filter nodes to target a deployment by a substring of the node name, then you are out of luck - resorting to hacking your hosts file on windows to null route all the hosts you don't want to hit, followed by deploying to all nodes from the brain dead GUI.

With a proper CLI, only your imagination reduces your ability to solve whatever business problem (and they are infinite).

The net result of this shallow learning curve? We got a lot of people who refused to learn how to manage a network, winging it and being employed in positions of significance - average corp. with hopelessly leaky data safeguards and so on.

So back to the ux archaic editor, nothing has surpassed it despite 40 years of continual focus. While I wouldn't dismiss attempts to improve it out of hand (I'm a paid up customer of ST2), I also wouldn't count on an revolution relegating vim to the history books anytime soon.

As for VS, Idea etc. they are merely a chapter 11 filing away from being forgotten. Eclipse could live on. Who knows.

Emacs is only about 30 years old (VIM is only 20 yro), I guess you are talking about text-based interfaces in general?

I'm not going to completely disagree with you here. There are lots of time I've found a shell to be useful, but I've also changed my workflow to minimize the amount of time I spend there. Learning curve for shell is steep, not shallow, but I've gone through much of that 20 years ago. If there is an old tool I can use to do something, I'm all for it, but if its a new tool, I'll go for the visual one with the lower learning curve, because I'm quite busy. Still, nothing beats shell for composability and flexibility, I definitely lose something with my approach. I find lots of promise in projects like Mozilla's Ubiquity, but I have a feeling the next step are actually Siri-like dialogue systems (whether typed or spoken).

But we are talking about editors that are used to edit code. I'll argue that language aware editors (in Eclipse, Idea, VS) have already greatly surpassed VIM/Emacs in terms of productivity, but then you could argue back that VIM/Emacs could re-support these features (and people have crammed them in at some points, though these have failed to stick). So let's just assume equal footing for now, and evaluate the experience. Given that we have a good understanding of the development process now, I'll argue that an IDE with high-discoverability of its capabilities is easier to use than Emacs/VIM which require substantial training to master. Now what Emacs/VIM give you is lots of power, but I don't think most of us need that. Heck, I've even moved away from Emacs for Latex programming, where the "build project/view PDF" menu option in TeXniCenter is good enough for me.

I use Sublime on Linux/OS X/Windows. Please tell me more about how my editor of choice isn't available everywhere? If you're a sysop, or a devop and you spend a non-trivial amount of time remoted to strange and random servers then learning vim or emacs is a good choice. Unless its a Windows server.

As a Linux user, as soon as you have SSH access to that strange server you can easily use gvfs to use sublime-text remotely, it's working great and is sooo simple to use..

It's probably not worth for a quick "let's change a setting in /etc/xyz" edit but it's worth it for everything else!

p.s.: i'm quit esure mac os x can do the same and in windows there is some third party app for remote ssh access/mounting.

I'm increasingly using Linux on ARM devices. Sublime Text 2's non-support for ARM has really been limiting its usefulness for me lately.

Could always ping the developers a feature request, they seem to like hearing from the community and reacting to people's needs.

There have been quite a number of requests for ARM support from the community already and the developers have, as far as I've seen, silently ignored them, which makes the situation even more annoying.

Emacs is perfectly capable of running on an ASCII terminal. I suspect Sublime is not.

I (and all the contributors to Brackets) respectfully disagree that a text editor released before the internet was available is the best we can do for web professionals.

We are really honored to be compared to Sublime and Textmate at this early stage. Those are fantastic text editors.

The purpose of the Brackets project isn't to replace those editors, but to inspire new ideas for web development tooling. It's simply a sandbox where the web development community can experiment with new ideas. Because it's written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, everyone can get involved.

-Adam Lehman Brackets Product Manager

> Eventually everyone's editor search ends with vim, emacs or a management position.

I respect the wit (a lot), but I'm not sure this the opinion you profess is really true of everyone in general.

I can type plenty fast and my muscle memory is kinda crazy insane... Notepad++ gets me everywhere I ever need to go.

I spend most of my time trying to write the least amount of code possible rather than worrying too much about what editor I use for writing my code.

Not trying to argue. Whatever floats your boat etc.

I have a feeling that we might add Sublime to that list at some point. It is cross-platform and easily extensible. I hope it can survive long enough to accumulate enough plugins and developers and be open-sourced at some point.

But that I'm an Emacs guy.

    I hope it can survive long enough to accumulate enough plugins

I don't think I'll ever understand why people would invest time (e.g., hundreds of hours over the course of years) extending closed source software over which they have so little control. So many people used TextMate until the development slowed. And now these same people seem to have jumped to Sublime Text. Did they port all the TextMate plugins they had written? Or did they not write any TextMate plugins to begin with? I'm guessing the latter because when I've browsed collections of config files at GitHub, the people who use closed source editors tend not to extend them, which is probably a wise choice.

AFAIK, text mate bundles can be dropped into ST2.

Nice, thanks for the info. That was a great move by the ST2 developers.

I think themes and snippets are compatible, but not full plugins.

Not sure that Sublime Text 2 fits with those other products you mentioned.

I recognize that anecdotes != winning PowerBall tickets, but I have never in my life met a user of Chocolat, Light IDE, or Cloud9.

But pretty much every Mac or Windows developer I know has ST2 at least installed (Linux, not so much (at least not yet), although it is available).

I use vi, emacs, iawriter, and sublime text fairly simultaneously. I love the iCloud support in iawriter (for short notes, etc.). I love sublime text for beauty. I use vi for config files or when things are going badly on a system. I use emacs by default.

I use Emacs, Vim and ST2 all the same, and most of the time, ST2 lets me do the same editing task with simpler keystrokes.

So my fingers don't look as busy as when using Vim, but I'm actually doing the same thing and postponing RSI.

Yeah, Vim and Emacs are actively developed (I checked the repositories the other day, commits every day on both) and the communities are huge.

The editors are different, yes, but both brilliant.

If vim actually supported other keyboard formats properly (rather than making the user redefine them from scratch) I would switch in a heartbeat. But until then, vim is useless to me.

The "sticking around" argument is weak. It applies equally well to Windows, Office, the System 360 line of computers and plain old telephone service.

ST2 seems to be sticking around so far, it's not the author's fault that it's new.