Editors

[Hammer]

Emacs, Vi, TheOneTruePad?

[Robin S]

Why not just move this thread here?

[Hammer]

Why not just move this thread here?

Because people are simply listing what they use. They are not (yet) having the Battle of the Editors. I've seen the Battle of the Editors many times and that isn't it.

[Dingbats]

Just to start out: Vi(m) is superior to Emacs.

[d3adf001]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/ joe takes the cake imo

[xyzzy]

Emacs, of course.

Code: Select all

1.      Onward, Emacs coders, marching as to war,
        with the cross of Stallman going on before.
        Gnu, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
        forward into battle see his banners go!

        (Meta-x-Refrain):
        Onward, Emacs coders, marching as to war,
        with the cross of Stallman going on before.

2.      At the sign of triumph Vi's host doth flee;
        on then, Emacs coders, on to victory!
        Vi's foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
        brothers, lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.
        (Refrain)

3.      Like a mighty army moves the church of Gnu;
        brothers, we are treading where the FSF have trod.
        We are not divided, all one body we,
        one in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
        (Refrain)

4.      ed and EVE may perish, TECO rise and wane,
        but the church of Stallman constant will remain.
        Gates of vi can never against that church prevail;
        we have the Gnu's own promise, and that cannot fail.
        (Refrain)

5.      Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,
        blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
        Glory, laud, and honor unto Gnu the King,
        this through countless ages men and lispers sing.
        (Refrain)


Beat that, VIpers!

[hendusoone]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/ joe takes the cake imo

I am with you on this one. Commands are simple combinations of the ctrl key and letters (none of that crazy :wtf! garbage). There is no strange key combination to press before it will let you enter text. If you need help, just follow the instructions in the top right, and then the help screen stays right there at the top of your terminal as you continue editing your text!

Also, it has some sexy syntax highlighting.

[zombie_monkey]

I use vi not very often and I have never used emacs, but I understand emacs uses a lot of key combos (ctrl/shift/alt) which I dislike.

[zenten]

Pico kicks all their asses.

Cept maybe that joe-editor thing. I haven't tried that yet.

[crazyjimbo]

At my work, use of Nano is a sackable offense. We assume the boss is joking, but no one is sure enough to try it out.

[xyzzy]

Hm. Nano is only used for quick edits on other machines, otherwise it's Emacs all the way.

And that's mostly because Emacs is overkill, ed is nasty, and vi is worse than useless.

[Korandder]

I tried emacs but found it a some what unpleasant experience. I have found vi more to my liking.

[photosinensis]

Vim. It's just a text editor.

Emacs, on the other hand, only needs a kernel. When a full GNU distribution comes out, complete with HURD, it will only contain HURD, GNU Emacs, GCC, and GNU Make. Anything else is entirely superfluous and unnecessary. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to deal with that kind of overhead (and distraction potential) while I'm trying to get work done.

[++$_]

Emacs (well... XEmacs, really). To use emacs well takes a lot of practice, but I'm really fast at this point.

I don't actually know what features vim has because I don't use it, but things I like about emacs are the syntax highlighting (especially perl), customizability, multiple buffers, isearch, regex find/replace, ispell, M-x shell, rectangle commands, the kill ring, macros, in-editor debugging, mail, .......

The only thing I don't like about emacs is confusing C-x 0 and C-x 1, causing me to close the wrong window.

[dazomby]

MS Word cuz it got gr8 indentation.



Nah, just kidding.
When I used UNIX I used VI.
Or possibly Emacs with Viper.

Now I've joined the dark side and use Windows and since most of my coding is done for Matlab, most of my coding is done in Matlab.
I miss VI.

/dz

[rwald]

Vim. It's just a text editor.

Emacs, on the other hand, only needs a kernel. When a full GNU distribution comes out, complete with HURD, it will only contain HURD, GNU Emacs, GCC, and GNU Make. Anything else is entirely superfluous and unnecessary. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to deal with that kind of overhead (and distraction potential) while I'm trying to get work done.

Sure, that seems like a nice userspace stack, but what will you use to edit text?

(Vim user)

[evilbeanfiend]

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EmacsIsSuperman
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IfYourCarWereEmacs

[Longsight]

At my work, use of Nano is a sackable offense. We assume the boss is joking, but no one is sure enough to try it out.

Trying to get nano's syntax highlighting to work reliably has irritated me for a while now, especially when working remotely with PHP. Every line that includes a URI ends up getting treated as a comment, due to the inevitable existence of '//' after the protocol.

[verdatum]

XEmacs? Nah, no one REALLY uses that. Everyone just got together and pretended to migrate to that briefly. The entire purpose for the fork's existence is to piss off Stallman for the shear joy of it.

Emacs is a lovely idea, and I'd consider taking it seriously, just as soon as someone gives me the default keyboard shortcut (read: not command string) to jump to a specific line number.

I'm sorry, but when you are forced to operate on someone else's computer and be flexible enough to work in whatever environment is forced upon you, vi works quite powerfully out of the box, particularly when briefly editing and quickly navigating preexisting files. It's a dice shoot what version of emacs with what features and what default configuration will be on an unfamiliar system. It may not even be there at all, and then what do emacs people do? They sit around wishing they could figure out how to close out of a vi session once they've finished.

Emacs has the potential to work well, so long as you build or track down a good configuration file, know how it's set, and hey, it doesn't hurt to learn the bulk of lisp, even though emacs very probably the only lisp code you'll ever edit your entire life. It's a bloated text editor that wishes it was an IDE...in fact it probably wishes it was an OS. If you need an IDE, use a real IDE. If you just need a text editor, use vi.


OK, to be honest, I do everything with ed. I keep the entire contents of my directory, with the exception of the line I'm currently editing, up in my head. It makes edits lightning fast.

[evilbeanfiend]

well for me its f5 cos i've bound it to that - but if you want to know a key binding C-h b (by default) will show you all the key bindings emacs is currently using. (C-h ? will show you all the other help functions)

emacs is my ide, and my OS for that matter. i think the main thing here is that if you are more sys-adminy, working on various machines, especially ones which may be severely broken, then vi makes sense. if you are a developer, working on one machine, especially if you are dealing with a number of complex languages, then emacs makes more sense.

i'm definitely in the code monkey camp

[EvanED]

XEmacs? Nah, no one REALLY uses that. Everyone just got together and pretended to migrate to that briefly. The entire purpose for the fork's existence is to piss off Stallman for the shear joy of it.

Emacs is a lovely idea, and I'd consider taking it seriously, just as soon as someone gives me the default keyboard shortcut (read: not command string) to jump to a specific line number.

M-g g.

I'm not sure why, but this sometimes works for me, and sometimes tries to run something relating to fonts. (I think it's consistent by installation though.)

[evilbeanfiend]

oh and emacs -q will load default setting.

[verdatum]

emacs is my ide, and my OS for that matter. i think the main thing here is that if you are more sys-adminy, working on various machines, especially ones which may be severely broken, then vi makes sense. if you are a developer, working on one machine, especially if you are dealing with a number of complex languages, then emacs makes more sense.

i'm definitely in the code monkey camp

Well, if you want to make legitimate arguments, that makes this whole war rather difficult. I truthfully agree with this, and I'm also in the code monkey camp. I only forced myself into vi when I switched to a company with lab layouts of mad paranoia and had to edit all over the place.

Still, I've grown to prefer the terser keybindings of vi. But the obvious retort to that is to just use elvis.

Oh, and I've got the emacs and vi o'reilly books shelved side-by-side in my cube just to set off extremists of both camps who stop by.

[wing]

Code: Select all

tony@SLAB-UBUNTU:~$ sudo aptitude install emacs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information     
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done     
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
  emacs22-bin-common emacs22-common emacs22-gtk emacsen-common liblockfile1
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  emacs emacs22-bin-common emacs22-common emacs22-gtk emacsen-common
  liblockfile1
0 packages upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 21.0MB of archives. After unpacking 68.4MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]68mb!?!?  TO EDIT TEXT? fuckno
Invalid response.  Please enter a valid command or '?' for help.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.
tony@SLAB-UBUNTU:~$


You'll note that those aren't even any libraries or anything. That's. Just. Emacs. Visual Studio isn't even that big!*

How big is Vim? A little bit bigger than 24mb. Still not good, but it's powerful enough to warrant the space.

*Sarcasm

I use Nano for config files, and Vim for code. I don't do documents on the Linux box yet - OpenOffice is too painfully suck.

[d3adf001]

wing part if that is the gtk version it tooks like

[wing]

wing part if that is the gtk version it tooks like

... You're right. Why the hell is that included in the metapackage? What if I don't run X?

Just checked the size on the gtk package, it's 9mb. So it's all still absurdly huge.

[adlaiff6]

If you need to see the file you're editing, you must be a pussy. Ed for lyfe!

[davean]

emacs-nox is the package you want, get it right

Code: Select all

davean@sera:~$ sudo apt-get install emacs-nox
[sudo] password for davean:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libswfdec0.5-1 libswscale1d
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  emacs21-bin-common emacs21-common emacs21-nox
Suggested packages:
  emacs21-el emacs21-common-non-dfsg
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  emacs-nox emacs21-bin-common emacs21-common emacs21-nox
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 11.4MB of archives.
After unpacking 41.0MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

And it *still* does more then visual studio.

[wing]

Yeah. It does more than Visual Studio because it's most of a fucking OS.

[davean]

Yeah. It does more than Visual Studio because it's most of a fucking OS.

A well designed OS, thats why Visual Studio doesn't run on it.

[xyzzy]

emacs is my ide, and my OS for that matter. i think the main thing here is that if you are more sys-adminy, working on various machines, especially ones which may be severely broken, then vi makes sense. if you are a developer, working on one machine, especially if you are dealing with a number of complex languages, then emacs makes more sense.

i'm definitely in the code monkey camp

Well, if you want to make legitimate arguments, that makes this whole war rather difficult. I truthfully agree with this, and I'm also in the code monkey camp. I only forced myself into vi when I switched to a company with lab layouts of mad paranoia and had to edit all over the place.

Still, I've grown to prefer the terser keybindings of vi. But the obvious retort to that is to just use elvis.

Oh, and I've got the emacs and vi o'reilly books shelved side-by-side in my cube just to set off extremists of both camps who stop by.

Nah, nano pwns vi for that sort of work. Seriously, modal editing sucks.
Emacs for work on my own machine, nano for little configs elsewhere.

And for any documents that need to look pretty, aucTeX is the best TeX mode in existence.

[Pesto]

I use ex. I told you I was hardcore.

[HappySmileMan]

Microsoft Windows Notepad (Ultimate edition 2007)

[evilbeanfiend]

I use ex. I told you I was hardcore.

real hardcore text editing is done with pen and paper, and using blood for ink.

[davean]

I use ex. I told you I was hardcore.

real hardcore text editing is done with pen and paper, and using blood for ink.

Specifically your own blood, and the pen is your own carved finger bone.

[zenten]

I use ex. I told you I was hardcore.

real hardcore text editing is done with pen and paper, and using blood for ink.

And then running the paper over your hard drive, to get the iron in the ink to cause fluctuation on the drive to have your file edited?

[burkelibbey]

The only thing I don't like about emacs is confusing C-x 0 and C-x 1, causing me to close the wrong window.

I always think of the 1 in C-x 1 as a laser that kills every other window (makes a lot of sense in a vertical split), and the 0 in C-x 0 as a target that focuses on the current window and kills it.

Oh, and emacs, without a doubt.

[HappySmileMan]

The only thing I don't like about emacs is confusing C-x 0 and C-x 1, causing me to close the wrong window.

I always think of the 1 in C-x 1 as a laser that kills every other window (makes a lot of sense in a vertical split), and the 0 in C-x 0 as a target that focuses on the current window and kills it.

Oh, and emacs, without a doubt.

When you have to think of an editor in terms of lasers and targets just to make sense of how to close it, that's when I doubt it's efficiency

EDIT: You can't quote someone who's name has a '[' in it apparently
It seems that you can if it's the outermost quote tag. It starts breaking when the quote tags are nested.

[!xobile]

Vi, its what i started using, and will continue to use. Apparently Vi has its own gang sign now.

[evilbeanfiend]

The only thing I don't like about emacs is confusing C-x 0 and C-x 1, causing me to close the wrong window.

I always think of the 1 in C-x 1 as a laser that kills every other window (makes a lot of sense in a vertical split), and the 0 in C-x 0 as a target that focuses on the current window and kills it.

Oh, and emacs, without a doubt.

When you have to think of an editor in terms of lasers and targets just to make sense of how to close it, that's when I doubt it's efficiency

meh, that's what key remapping is for (its f1 for me), and anyway since when was vi easy to close (or ed for that matter)