From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Marc Weber Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving? Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 02:35:25 +0200 Message-ID: <1377648305-sup-8813@nixos> References: <87ppsyu1l0.fsf@nl106-137-194.student.uu.se> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1377650128 4072 80.91.229.3 (28 Aug 2013 00:35:28 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:35:28 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Aug 28 02:35:31 2013 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1VETjO-0006QS-E3 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 28 Aug 2013 02:35:30 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:59731 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VETjN-0000kR-Ho for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 27 Aug 2013 20:35:29 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:45760) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VETj4-0000kK-KO for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 27 Aug 2013 20:35:17 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VETiy-0005L0-0i for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 27 Aug 2013 20:35:10 -0400 Original-Received: from mout.gmx.net ([212.227.17.22]:60844) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VETix-0005Cv-O0 for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 27 Aug 2013 20:35:03 -0400 Original-Received: from mail.gmx.net ([93.216.244.99]) by mail.gmx.com (mrgmx003) with ESMTPA (Nemesis) id 0Lpbqo-1VisWQ0QkA-00fSq4 for ; Wed, 28 Aug 2013 02:35:01 +0200 Original-Received: by mail.gmx.net (sSMTP sendmail emulation); Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:35:25 +0000 In-reply-to: <87ppsyu1l0.fsf@nl106-137-194.student.uu.se> User-Agent: Sup/git X-Provags-ID: V03:K0:ItfY02h3uX8wZ4CBBIXum/dRGl0rSS0WYngJiKC2ktlJFtKphQ4 0Iw51/elK5Dze+axyJz54iVCpzGC5N5TLzEsxShVjxx2UyuCF9jJCvxj/+/r6nipajWpRwL 1c2Qn2RNq6b6NARGaAaI3Wq7S227yBx40sA4EyjoKRNdOnsu7drZgn2a/vUhJBiORfr9HRP 4Pxc913LucvR1B92lmDSg== X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.4.x-2.6.x [generic] X-Received-From: 212.227.17.22 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:93121 Archived-At: > 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 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