Every time you are looking for a text editor, no matter what language you are using, vi and Emacs are hall-of-famers.
However they are ancient, and we have better alternatives (at least I hope we do).
Why are developers stuck on these two editors? Shouldn't we drop them and try to invent or look for something new?
(I have full respect for Emacs and vi fans).
The main reasons why I prefer a terminal-based editor over a full-fledged IDE:
ssh to whatever computer I need to be on, fire up Vim and start working away. In a day-to-day basis, using screen session and Vim allows for easy access from any location.IDEs are nice to throw classes around within your project, but for me, my productivity is orders of magnitudes higher using Vim.
ssh (scp, sftp), with the UI running locally.
Commented
Mar 25, 2011 at 1:20
Programmers are notorious for using the tools that helps them get the job done in the most efficient way possible. These editors are ancient yet still being used because they are good, solid editors, proven by time. If they get the job done and get the job done well, why should we drop them in favor of something else?
You assume they don't evolve. Emacs continues to grow by leaps and bounds; and, while vi was getting kind of hoary, Vim has rejuvenated it and if anything it's growing (feature-wise at least) faster than Emacs.
But when it comes down to it, it's what you work best with that matters. If you're most productive in Eclipse, more power to you. Same if you prefer Vim.
Many (most?) of the best programmers I know despise IDEs and rely solely on Emacs. I am not quite so diehard, and use both Eclipse and Emacs, but there are a couple of reasons I prefer using Emacs:
Consistent experience with ANY language - Support in Eclipse for some of the newer languages (Scala, Clojure, etc.) is inconsistent at best, and subpar at worst. The plugin authors are hard at work improving the experience, but I often run into little things that feel janky. Sure you can always switch to another IDE which has better support for that particular language, but now you are juggling IDEs. I've never felt this way while working in Emacs.
I dislike IDE "magic" - IDEs tend to do a lot of stuff automatically in the name of convenience. This is great...until something breaks. Then it can be a frustrating or even infuriating process getting things back on track.
I've been toying with the idea of switching to Redcar editor. It's extensible like Emacs, but instead of Emacs Lisp you use JRuby. It's lightweight, and definitely not a full blown IDE. If you are into TextMate, it's compatible with TextMate bundles, but it has the benefits of being free and open source. Definitely a tool worth checking out, especially for Ruby developers.
shouldn't we drop them and trying to invent or looking for something new?
tl;dr: Many people don't want to learn a new editor
The full answer:
A UNIX wizard hears cries of torment from his apprentice's computer room where the apprentice is studying, and goes to investigate.
He finds the apprentice in obvious distress, nearly on the verge of tears. "What's the problem?" he asks. "Why did you cry out?"
"It's terrible using this system. I must use four editors each day to get my studies done, because not one of them does everything."
The wizard nods sagely, and asks, "And what would you propose that will solve this obvious dilemma?"
The student thinks carefully for several minutes, and his face then lights up in delight. Excitedly, he says, "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything that the existing four editors do, but do their jobs better, and faster. And because of my new editor, the world will be a better place."
The wizard quickly raises his hand and smacks the apprentice on the side of his head. The wizard is old and frail, and the apprentice isn't physically hurt, but is shocked by what has happened. He turns his head to face the wizard. "What have I done wrong?" he asks.
"Fool!" says the wizard. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"
Immediately, the apprentice is enlightened. http://neugierig.org/content/unix/
emacs. vi instead made it more convenient to interact with the other tools.
I think the IDE's (Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ) are fit to solve another class of problems than the ones you solve with emacs / Vim.
When you have a large platform to code on, with lots of libraries and high integration between all elements (sounds like Microsoft), an IDE will prove it's worth. Some will refer to this as "sticking libraries together" and don't suppose it to be "real code". It will help you greatly though when catching errors early (in a way even Emacs can't).
When you develop end-user applications for (say) Android, you can actually do it without Eclipse. However, with all sorts of files that need to be added before deploying, Eclipse will help you a great deal by automating those tasks for you.
So if you're an application developer working on only one platform with lots of libraries (developing Enterprise-class applications in Java EE, .NET etc.) an IDE will be an "improvement" in your workflow. However, as soon as you have to work regularly in a terminal environment (on Unix-servers, for example) or you're using lots of different languages, No IDE can measure against the qualities Vim / emacs.
One last thing is that working using Vim / emacs forces you to understand at least a bit of a platform / language before using it. Many IDEs allow you to operate in a language without knowing what's going on; so using Vim / emacs will force yourself to gain some insight in what you're really doing.
In the course of some 40 years in computing, as student and professional, I have used at least fifteen (15) different editors and IDEs. Of all of them, emacs was by far the best, then and now.
First, I spend too much time bouncing around among multiple files and multiple places inside individual files to have a good experience with any editor that refuses to let me see more than one file at time, or more than two at one time. Emacs is the only editor or IDE I have seen that lets me see everything I need at once. (Some years back, while exploring a legacy system, I routinely had eight (8) panes open in an emacs window. Even today, I routinely have three or four panes open, and sometimes I will have two or three invocations of emacs open, because I need multiple shells, and I need to copy and paste results among them.)
Second, I'm still only human, and I do occasionally make mistakes. Every other editor I have ever used was perfectly happy to let me shoot my foot off, WITHOUT WARNING, with no ability to recover, leaving me wanting to commit unspeakably vile, violent acts against the author of said GDPOS. (The ones that got me weren't QUITE as bad as the crock that almost got Charles Simonyi lynched while he was at Xerox PARC, before he went to Microsoft and inflicted Hungarian notation on the world - an act for which lynching is entirely too soft a punishment.) Emacs has never done this to me; it has never irrevocably destroyed anything without giving me a BIG warning. Back when I was still new to emacs, I would occasionally go "What just happened?", and I invariably figured out what I'd done in a few seconds, and knew how to repair it just as quickly.
There is no such thing as an editor that actually ENHANCES productivity. The best you can get is minimal degradation of productivity. The metric, for me, is "How bad does this thing slow me down?" Compared to emacs, on the kinds of things I normally do, everything else is far worse.
My ONLY gripe with emacs was that it was not available for Oberon, when I was playing with Oberon quite a few years ago.
Aside from a little bit of BASIC as a kid, I learned programming on Unix. The Unix philosophy is to have many smaller tools that interoperate, but that each focus on doing one job and doing it well. Hence, it feels natural to me to have separate software for editing, compiling, source control, and debugging. Interestingly, IDEs are "integrated," but you still can't fit all that functionality into one window all at once, so you end up with things like perspectives, where you are essentially switching modes between those different tasks anyway, albeit with some overlap.
I could turn it around and ask why people tolerate painfully slow non-vim editing. The best way I can describe the feeling of watching someone edit code that way is that it feels like when you get stuck behind a car going 10 mph too slow because he's on the phone, or like watching a relatively fast hunt-and-peck typist. They're going fast enough to get the job done, but at the same time slow enough to be maddening.
A lot of people say they spend most of their time thinking anyway, so a little bit faster editing doesn't make much difference. In that case, typing is an interruption, and a few extra seconds of editing can make the difference between keeping your train of thought or having to regain it. Also, if you're a long-time touch typist, you know that your fingers type common words without you even consciously thinking which keys to hit. When you're a long-time vim user, that kind of fluidity comes for things like moving lines and words around. In the time it takes to say "delete" in "delete those 2 lines" my fingers have already done it and my concentration is completely unbroken.
Vim is also extremely customizable, and your installed plugins and vimrc evolve as your work evolves. When something starts getting in your way, you look up a better way to do it, and incorporate that into your configuration or commonly used commands. I learned vi in 1993, and still make customizations when my needs change. Just this week I changed my tab filename completion to work more like bash's, because my workflow changed to do a lot more of that recently and the default behavior was getting on my nerves.
Also, I disagree about it not being worth the time to learn. It took way longer for me to learn to touch type than to feel productive in vi, for a similar boost in code editing speed, but you don't see programmers complaining about how long it took to learn to touch type. And you can learn at your own speed and add new commands to your repertoire as you have the inclination. If you start out with set im in your vimrc (stands for insertmode, but I affectionately call it idiotmode for when a colleague needs to type at my desk), you might not even realize you're using vim at all!
I'm a Vim user.
I have to use IDEs due to the projects that I'm working on, you can't circumvent that sometimes. I'm quite proficient at using Code::Blocks and Eclipse, however, whenever possible, I like the user interface of said IDEs to work like the one from Vim.
I have my own color scheme for Vim and I want the text editors of other IDEs to work in exactly the same way.
I'd wish for an IDE, that's missing the text editor, and where I can plug-in the editor I want. Wouldn't it be nice, If I could plug in my standard Vim into Emacs or Code::Blocks, but having the rest of the IDE around it?
It somehow escaped the scope of IDE developers, but I secretly wish for it almost always, when either I'm using only Vim and Makefiles for larger projects, or an IDE and its cumbersome text editor.
My IDE of choice is Linux. Heck, it can run other IDEs, serve websites, execute programs in a variety of languages, and by combining stuff (the pipe) it can run programs together that were written in different languages as though they were one. That thing is awesome. Oh, and it can connect to the internet and do all sorts of interesting things with it too, including spawning other versions of itself. Coolio!
Don't settle for an IDE when you already have linux.
I use Emacs as my primary editor. The only other editors I ever considered seriously were vim and TextMate. IDEs (and I tried a few including Eclipse) have not had the features I needed.
I actually had this conversation with a coworker of mine not to long ago. He was telling me how much better IDE are while he was using his mouse to click a bunch of buttons and menus. That just made me laugh.
I'll try out any editor with the following capabilities (all of which are critical the way I develop).
I also tend to do meta programming which often renders auto-refactor tools useless; the one area I think IDEs do tend be good at.
Others editors with a similarly rich heritage (and controversy) have been invented, and maybe it's just a matter of time before we switch from tools first written in the 1970s (vi/Emacs) to one from the 1980s (Sam) or even one from the 1990s (Acme).
"Sam is the preferred text editor of many eminent computer scientists; it replaced ed as Ken Thompson's favorite text editor, and he still uses it to this day. Sam is the text editor used by Bjarne Stroustrup and Brian Kernighan. Others, like Dennis Ritchie, have moved on to use Acme instead." Here's the Sam article from Wikipedia.
But what do I know, I'm still using Vim.
Am I the only person who still uses ed occasionally?
(And for those folks who think code bloat is relevant ...
$ size /bin/ed
text data bss dec hex filename
42160 2300 0 44460 adac /bin/ed
$ size /bin/vi
text data bss dec hex filename
692378 27796 13884 734058 b336a /bin/vi
$ size /usr/bin/emacs
text data bss dec hex filename
2033257 4692020 0 6725277 669e9d /usr/bin/emacs
)
Another advantage of ed is that you can run it on a teletype ... or the dumbest of dumb terminals.
ed. "When I was growing up we didn't have interactivity and we liked it that way!"
Commented
Apr 4, 2011 at 17:00
"Better" is a subjective word. If i am happy and productive using a text editor, who is X or Y or Z to say "drop it and use something else"? If it is a corporate policy or such that makes it a can't-but situation then we have no choice though.
I supposed I am an odd duck, but I actually use different editors, depending on the situation.
Vim:
When I am connected (ssh'd) onto a distant server (for example looking at the logs) and I want to quickly edit a file and make some tweak. Much faster than navigating to the same folder (SAN hosted) from my local desktop.
Notepad++:
About the same situation: for a quick edit, but this time when I just don't want to wait for Eclipse (corporate IDE) to load.
Eclipse:
It's the corporate IDE where I work. We have some in-house plugins to be able to launch the build from Eclipse on a remote machine directly... and most importantly a plugin to locate the libraries produced by other teams and that we're working with (and replicate the headers in local for fast indexing). Since I am talking a good thousands of libraries... it's really useful ;)
OpenGrok / Doxygen:
More code browsing than edition proper, but still very useful! My browser is configured to navigate, so it's put to good use here.
As a conclusion: I just tend to use whatever editor allows me to accomplish the task with relative ease and decent speed.
I'd rather eat my own hands than use either one of them. I loved Visual Studio when I was doing C++. Eclipse is meh. IntelliJ IDEA is excellent. I used to love JBuilder too, but I haven't used it for years.
Sometimes I'll be working on mostly bare systems, where the only installed editor is vi. For cases like those, it really helps to know at least basic vi commands.
vi and emacs are also very extendable, so much that they indeed can be full functioning IDEs with the right amount of plugins. For me, I can edit files much faster in vi, as I don't have to take my hands off of the keyboard to move a mouse around. It also has features that I haven't seen in some IDEs (although I admit I haven't looked much), like being able to edit columns of text, storing multiple "cut" words into multiple buffers for pasting, etc.
The editors take some time to learn, but they are also really powerful. And yes, they're not for everybody.
An interesting somewhat related read is Why should I use an IDE?
I stick to vi because it was the first editor I learned in school and it is the one that I'm the most productive with today. I work with a lot of unix variants and it is available on all of them (and it works the same way regardless of environment). It does what I need it to do, so why change for the sake of changing.
I do use an IDE for my java work (now Intellij Idea), but I spend a lot of my time using vi.
Are there better alternatives? Just the other day I had a list of schema names that I had to shorten (thanks, Oracle!). At least half of them ended in the word "Test". I decided to drop the "Test" from the end and prefix the name with "T". In vi, this was a simple regex search-and-replace, are there any recent editors that can do this?
Right now, I'm finding myself working half the time in, of all things, nano, simply because it's the tool that fits the job - editing small scripts on the commandline over ssh. Using Eclipse for that would be like a waiter using a turbo-powered infomercial-style slice-dice-chop-and-blend food processor to grind pepper over my salad.