Comments on: Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages

By: Cyril Slobin

Cyril Slobin — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 07:48:39 +0000

I’d been a vim user for about a year when I started learning lisp. In the free lisp IDE world, there’s pretty much only one player, and that’s emacs (with SLIME)

I am using Vim for Lisp (not Common Lisp, but newLISP) programming on everyday basis. I have write my own syntax highlighting mode for it, because the existing one was unsatisfactory. My .vimrc is 373 lines long just now. I do not although use it as IDE, I believe that very idea of IDEs (eclipce, visual studio, emacs, any) is bad. What’s wrong with me?

Ideally the editors should have every command reachable from a menu and a customizable key binding next to the menu item.

Once, because of some strange OS error, Vim stops to respond to keyboard. I have spent about five minutes to realize that I can select File -> Save and then Exit form menu by a mouse. Never done this before. ;-)

By: Links Saturday « Helpful Linux Tidbits

Links Saturday « Helpful Linux Tidbits — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:50:35 +0000

[...] Emacs, Lisp, Vim – Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages [...]

By: heden

heden — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:03:14 +0000

i use ee.

yeah, make fun of me. it doesn’t matter. it’s notepad for my fbsd box. i code in it. i write my budget in it. i save a lot more files in it, too.

ee!

By: steve

steve — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:44:01 +0000

I understand your pain.
Back in the day, when VAXen were my standard platform, I had an EDT/TPU customization all singing and dancing, including things like binding functions written in one part of a split-screen to keys on the fly.
When they slid into history, I went back to beginner stage, and stick with menu picks and mouse-driven systems. To this day I still have to look up the emacs cut and paste commands, since they aren’t the otherwise ubiquitous ^C/^X/^V

By: Lee

Lee — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:49:09 +0000

@Gabriel Sean Farrell: you might be interested to learn that KDE supports vim as a standardised editing component, including use in web forms etc. The actual vim plugin is a seperate project (yvis or something like that), but the support required is right in KDE core.

By: Lee

Lee — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:35:23 +0000

This is why we should start having a higher-level shared library base for the OS, much like modern desktops provide. Unix should know what keystrokes you prefer to use for next buffer etc., regardless of what editor you’re using. Editors should plug into this, and use the shortcuts configured. Remote filesystems over ssh, tagging (web style or ctags style) should be available on both the command line and the GUI. Apps should be able to present a dialog to the user responsible for something, even if that user is coding at a console.

The problem isn’t editors. It’s the OS layer.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:07:23 +0000

Switching languages is hard if they have fundamentally different paradigms: eager vs. lazy, functional vs. impure, Prolog vs. everything else. Switching editors is like that.

By: Reid

Reid — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 05:53:00 +0000

You think switching editors is as hard as switching languages? Wrong. It’s *harder*. Languages don’t go into your muscle memory (alright, maybe a bit, but not really). I don’t have to enumerate why, you’ve already made all the points why. Languages are comparatively easy to pick up; so many of them borrow ideas from each other.

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 05:38:40 +0000

Oops, hit enter on that last one by mistake.

Meant to add; could you post your .emacs? I feel like I’m coming from pretty much the same place so it might get me over a bit of the hump. (Is there a good .emacs repository somewhere?)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 05:35:38 +0000

Sigh, I’m still at the “given up on CL twice because of Emacs” place. I cringe at opening vim without my vimrc. Can’t build up the energy/time to try to beat emacs into usable shape.