Re:Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (st...
by seanmcdirmid on Friday December 14, 2012 @06:31PM
(#4923918)
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'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.