[forbes]

I use both Emacs and vim on a daily basis. Emacs is my main editor and vim is for quickly dropping in to make a change in a terminal either locally or on a server.

Both are amazing. Both are rock solid. Both are infinitely extensible. Both are free as in beer and as in freedom.

I'm not afraid of paying good money for software. I don't think it is necessary to pay for a closed-source text editor when such good open-source options exist that can do everything the commercial product can do and more.

TextMate (and now Sublime Text) have been popular in the hacker community, particularly with Rails people. The only advantage I can see is eye-candy. They look great on Macs.

I tried TextMate and put it in the trash as soon as I found it had no split windows. Not only that, I couldn't add split windows even if I had the time. If vim or Emacs is missing something, you can add it.

End of rant.

[huskyr]

Have you actually tried Sublime? It has split windows. And you can extend is pretty easily using packages. I've read many posts of vi and Emacs hardcore users who actually liked Sublime.

[forbes]

Yes I have. My comment about split windows was about TextMate, which 4 years later still doesn't have them. (Coming in TextMate 2, which will be released sometime after Half Life 3.)

Sublime has the eye candy, that I was talking about. It looks great. The 'birds eye' view is nice, but not particularly useful. There is nothing that it can do that it can do that Emacs/vim can't do or couldn't do with a few minutes of macro-recording/scripting. This is why I am saying it isn't worth the money. The open-source alternatives are superb.

[kylebrown]

I don't want to need a cheat sheet to use my text editor, I already need them for the programming language, the regexes, mathematical notation, etc. I don't want to spend a few minutes doing macros/scripting, I want to spend my minutes on the problem domain I'm actually working on. I don't like modes (see NO MODES in the Bret Victor talk), and I like positioning my cursor with a mouse.

I haven't paid for Sublime (yet), but I'm still much less annoyed by the occasional nag-boxes than by modes. I don't see a future in emacs/vim, but I am anxiously awaiting an intelligent editor such as LightTable.

[forbes]

Remembering shortcuts for Sublime would be no different to remembering shortcuts for Emacs/vim/whatever. I agree with the 'no modes' sentiment which is why I find Emacs more natural than vim for the bulk of my work.

If you forget the short-cut for a command in Emacs, you can hit M-x, type in the name of the command (with completion to help you) and once you execute the command Emacs will TELL you the shortcut for next time (if there is one assigned). Best feature ever.

[munchor]

It's also closed source, meaning we can't fix something if we want to. We can't see what's going on back there. When it comes to a tool that I use every day with personal data, I really want it to be open source.

My browser and my text editor definitely need to be open source. Additionally, Emacs is really amazing, and like many others, I've been building this init.el for years (in my case months), meaning Emacs and I are really made for each other right now.

[wccrawford]

I actually did use the fact that MacVim is open source to fix a bug one day. Well, actually, someone else had already figured it out and provided a patch, but it wasn't in the main line yet and I really, really needed it that day. But I was already on the track to fixing it when I found someone else's patch.