Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Marc Weber <marco-oweber@gmx.de>]

> If you are a programmer, Eclipse is *not* Emacs' primary
> competitor (by a longshot). It is *vim*. vim and Emacs are
I've been starting to learn Vim in the first place because I felt
hitting meta- and ctrl- all the time would hurt my fingers in the long
run (That time I neither knew either editor well).

You cannot compare Vim & Emacs, neither should you. Also there is no
longer Vim vs Emacs due to "modal editing in Emacs" (additional plugins)
Both have strength and weaknesses.

Both are well suited to edit "text", thus to write emails.
If anybody prefers one over the other its a very personal preference.

> probably just about equally good for programming, but Emacs is
> better for every other writing you do: for example, I write this
> very text in Emacs, and I wouldn't want to do that in vim. vim is
So this thread might end up being yet another flame war.
Without giving reasons your sentence looks like being a personal
preference only. So we should not comment on it.

> All programmers use Emacs or vim. 
WTF - never heared about IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans, JEdit, notepad++ and
what not ? Eg for JEdit there is lilypond support with PDF rendering.
I don't know Emacs that well, but eventually nobody has done similar
work for Emacs (yet).
And there are many many many blogs which get written in browsers
probably (?) (Think about the facebook community alone)

Also there are "multiple forks of Emacs" - talking about one Emacs could
be too limited.

Let's say it differently: Just because you cannot imagine programmers
using tools others than Emacs/Vim, it doesn't mean that no such
programmers/programs exist. "The black swan" is a book dedicated to this
topic.

Eg one thing which comes to my mind is "disassemblers", there are some
dedicated tools which eventually outperform Emacs.

So it depends on the task.

> > But I do want my development environment to be reasonably
> > active, improving and well supported.  Can I reasonably trust
> > Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?
Define improving !?

Eg have a look at this one case:
http://slawekk.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/goodbye-proofgeneral/
and you'll understand that your question is too general to be replied
to. It depends on what you do. (I don't know about current state of that
case ..)
(Neiter do I want to say its representative - I cannot judge)

> > At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and
> > Java, and general text editor.
Well - emacs can display images, Vim cannot. So yes, Emacs eventually is
better for some latex tasks.

I'd stop thinking in terms of "vim or emacs", I'd start thinking in
terms of features, such as 
  - modal editing
  - extensible
  - ...

And depending on what you need, neither Vim nor Emacs should be the tool
of your choice, or can Emacs do VBA completion !? :-)
(I didn't look it up, maybe it even can, but I think writing Word macros
should still be done using the Word Macro editor)

If you have any problem, question, task, join any of both communities
and try to estimate what exsisting solutions will give you, then make a
choice.

What Emacs eventually is better at:
  - using <m-*> like mappings in console
  - debugging (due to much better async support in Emacs), although you
    can come close enough in Vim. I wrote my own solutions because I
    didn't find any fitting my needs
  - async io solutions such as interactive grep (eg get results in a
    window while grep is still running)
  - ..

For Vim there are some workarounds, so start to get your job done, too.

Neither Vim nor Emacs have "statically typed extension language" such as
Scala. Vim eg has eventually a nicer regular expression syntax for some
cases etc. There are many differences.

I don't want to start a flame war, I just want to say "This topic is
much more complicated that you can think about in a single day".

Thus unless there is a particular use case the whole discusion is pretty
much void IMHO.

Marc Weber