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by jeffisabelle 3148 days ago
> I’ve always wondered why some people seem so married to a single editor.

I'm thinking exactly opposite. I wonder why people change their IDE's/Editors so much between Eclipse/Visual Studio/IntelliJ or between notepad++/sublime-text/atom/VScode/coda/text-mate etc.

What's wrong with using vim or emacs and being happy rest of your career? It's funny so many of my colleagues kid me by saying "emacs is a great operating system but it lacks a good editor" without ever trying it while I'm using emacs without a problem for the last 6-7 years and people around me changing their editors every year to "popular editor of the year" for better features/performance.

3 comments

> It's funny so many of my colleagues kid me by saying "emacs is a great operating system but it lacks a good editor" without ever trying it while I'm using emacs without a problem for the last 6-7 years and people around me changing their editors every year

I thought only the vim users used that refrain. vim users are also unlikely to switch to a different editor.

Vim users used to, but now that emacs has a decent text editor[0], they can't.

[0]: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

> What's wrong with using vim or emacs and being happy rest of your career?

I agree with your basic notion -- it takes quite some time to be really fluent with serious IDEs and editors, so changing is inefficient.

But just one editor/IDE doesn't work for everyone. If you favour a GUI-only editor like Sublime Text, for example, then you probably need to also know a console-based one. Or if like me you prefer a heavy IDE for most project work, you probably need to be fluent with a lightweight editor.

For me IntelliJ IDEA + emacs covers all the bases. I'll look briefly at new tools to keep familiar with the landscape, but I'd rather invest the time it would take to learn them into something which will improve my skills in something more useful to the craft than just more tools that do essentially the same things.

I used EditPlus for over 8 years until SublimeText appeared, and have been using it for the last five years.

I think your point applies to current users of Atom/VSCode, but for me Sublime has stood the test of time, again and again.