I find this and the emacs sentiment really weird. I use vim daily for quick edits, but for any sizeable codebase, especially new/unfamiliar, IDE's are just better. It's like depriving yourself of a bunch of tools and helpers for no visible benefit.
Since I graduated, I've had people try to sell me on the following editors, which were going to be the future: BBEdit, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, Komodo Edit, NetBeans, and Eclipse.
Each was going to kill Emacs.
Somehow, I think I'll be using a version of Emacs until the day I can no longer type.
Meanwhile, everyone else is wasting months getting up to speed on the latest and greatest thing every 8 years or so.
This adds up over a career.
Oh, and by the by, this was written in Emacs using GhostText as the link between Firefox and Emacs.
>Meanwhile, everyone else is wasting months getting up to speed on the latest and greatest thing every 8 years or so.
Yeah I used to think this way, because you're right: becoming proficient in emacs takes significant effort and time.
But becoming proficient in VS code takes maybe 25 minutes. 25 minutes to change IDEs every 8 years or so doesn't seem like an onerous requirement to me.
Emacs just has extremely poor defaults and out of box UX.
>But becoming proficient in VS code takes maybe 25 minutes.
Becoming proficient in kicking a ball takes 5 minutes. Becoming proficient in football takes slightly longer. Magit alone makes VS Code look like a child's finger painting.
>Magit alone makes VS Code look like a child's finger painting.
Magit is indeed a great git client, but I don't see what that has to do with emacs having bad defaults and an out of box experience that could be charitably described as antique.
>You'll understand in 20 years when you're on your 4th IDE which will change the world^tm.
How condescending.
But no, I probably won't mind changing editors every few years because I am capable of learning new things and do not require a safe space to keep me insulated from the outside world.
An editor is the least interesting thing to learn in computer engineering. If you enjoy wasting your time may I suggest something like stamp collecting that doesn't create billions of dollars of lost productivity for the rest of us?
Plus I’m changing editors every 8 or 4 years because the “new one” is better in some regard. VSCode is a very good editor. Sublime was a good editor too, but VSCode was better enough to make me switch. Whatever comes after VSCode will be that much better!
So there is nothing wrong at all with switching to a new editor… it just means things are getting even better!!!
Bad defaults for who? Emacs userbase is quite heterogeneous, not everyone is a swdev, not everyone is young. All it takes to have great defaults is maybe ten instructions in init.el.
So true! Now don't get me wrong, I quite like VS Code as it's so easy to set up and there is a plugin for almost anything, but I find myself always coming back to Emacs.
He's right about the defaults though. Use something like Spacemacs or Doom if you just want to dip your toes in the goodness that is Emacs.
I typed up some thoughts about the nth time I tried out Visual Studio Code to see what all the fuss was about and if my productivity could be improved vs. Emacs. I might turn it into a blog post, if I can be arsed to start a blog again.
One header read: "Not better enough". Inasmuch as Visual Studio Code does anything better than Emacs, it doesn't do things better enough to justify expending the high activation energy of switching, unlearning my Emacs workflow and learning all that I need to know to do things Visual Studio Code's way.
I honestly believe emacs UX to be fairly superior. I watch my colleagues struggle to find open files among tens of open tabs in vs code every day. Or endlessly navigating on the filesystem tree with the side bar before finding what they need.
Things that take half a second in emacs take minutes for them. And the UI is so cluttered.
There are a number of neurodiverse hackers who've "switched off the targeting computer" precisely because it's disruptive to thought to always be having to constantly juggle the state of code in your head with the fucking video game appearing before your eyes as you type. I am one of them.
Maybe i just never gave the heavyweight ide tools a fair chance, but i always found them more distracting than helpful. Focus is king for me, and vim gives me that.
idk, I find I don't miss anything from heavyweight IDEs. I switched to neovim like 6 years ago. 95% of working with a codebase, familiar or not, is navigation and editing. LSPs enable pretty much any editor to intelligently navigate to definitions and find usages of a given construct. Anything beyond that is quickly hitting diminishing returns.
The one exception is maybe untangling particularly gnarly git conflicts.
Emacs is fine, but it's not really about the visual diff and more that you get syntax checking and other features in the diff view that afaik aren't available in lighter weight tool. Neogit is quite good and is heavily inspired by magit, so it's not like they're appreciably different.
Not OP, but I was confused as well, but found that a lot of people who did this had basically created an IDE-like experience with tmux, etc around vim, etc.
Not really my thing but I guess it works for them.
What tools, what helpers? I hear this comment a lot and it's just ignorance on the part of people who clearly have never tried to actually learn how to use (Neo)vim or Emacs. I've used Jetbrains, VSCode, Atom, Xcode plenty and there's nothing that I can do in those IDEs that I can't do in Vim besides things related to platform specific SDKs.
My current codebase is a liberal mixture of C, C++, Java, and mksh. The whole project uses CMake and GNU Autotools and ndk-build and whatever the heck calling mma with AOSP does.
There's no way to unify it given how many different moving parts are involved. Trying to fit this all within an IDE would be a project of its own...
A similar mix took me under 20 minutes to get a C++ + Rust + C# + TypeScript codebase working between VS proper and VS Code. In fact, I don't remember doing anything at all to get it working except installing damn node for TS and choosing CMake configuration in a dropdown.
Everyone's brain is different, but I'd bet you'd be surprised by how good you are at things you rely on an IDE for (autocomplete, go to definition). For other stuff, sed and grep will cover 90% of your needs. Source: me, and I'm pretty good at this.
Strongly disagree, but I am in a niche field, Linux kernel development. Emacs is really struggling with it's tools. But for Neovim: the plugins and good keycombos are absolutely essential to get certain functionality for my productivity.
* rg with telescope window to quickly find text in very large code basis is essential.
* Pressing spc, spc, to bring up a telescope window of my open buffers and typing in text to narrow them, very important.
* To date I still struggle to get the LSP to work the Linux kernel on VSCode, but on Neovim I got it working.
IDE's have a lot of menu clutter that I struggle to make good use of-most programmers working on user-space apps, it is likely fine, but for the kernel, we often need more control.
First I've heard of this. As a long-time vanilla Emacs user, I'm using consult-ripgrep and rg-project for ripgrep interfaces, consult-buffer for fast buffer and file switching, Eglot for LSP integration (mainly with clangd), etc. I've also got org-mode for note taking, magit for speedy Git manipulation, etc.
And all without any visible menus or clutter.
I suspect that a power Emacs user and a power Neovim user are more akin here to each other than to VS Code users.
I mostly use kickstart.nvim in Neovim. I really like using mnemonic key bindings (which do show a menu) with the functionality above. One real issue was the lack of a telescope competitor (and I noticed you did not mention one above). I really like the quick overlay for those actions is how Telescope in kickstart is programmed. I really do not like the results smushed at the bottom of the screen like how Doom handles it.
Spacemacs got me into mnemonic key bindings, but it was too buggy and development had slowed. I got some things working with Doom Emacs, but it had a lot of bugs as well. Part of that reason is projectile also seemed to no longer be worked on. They were converting over to project.el but that seems to be slow.
I struggle to find good bundles for Emacs. Doom Emacs is struggling with migrating their plugins. Most programmers I know use Emacs with few plugins and not the better IDE like plugins in Neovim.
