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by PaulHoule
11 days ago
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I've got really mixed feelings about Clojure. Like when I read Graham's book I went through a phase of "he wouldn't be fighting with nconc if he was using Clojure!" I find some algorithms to be easy and fun to write using persistent data structures and others maddening though if I did it more I'd get better at it. zippers are weirdly unergonomic because of some little bad choices. I badly wanted to do a project with the Clara rules engine but never got the chance. As for GNU emacs I got over it. Like I was introduced to it in 1989, it was the cool new editor for the Unix world, one of my friends loved scripting with it. However I experienced it getting really janky about 20 years before other software got janky and I don't know why. Some of it might have been rot in things it depends on, like it used to be curses apps actually worked right but now they suffer data corruption from the telnet/ssh connection and always seem to have an off-by-one on the screen size. X Windows got glitchier. I guess emacs was ahead of its time, now people write janky apps with Electron -- like I have to type R E A L L Y : S L O W L Y when I use Slack at work. Photoshop is like that too, computers are 100x's of times faster so Photoshop should boot up faster than Momo Chiyoda can transform but no, it doesn't. I switched to vim around 2003 as my emergency Unix editor because I could log into a busted system and start working and not have to rely on the package system (often the thing that was busted) to install emacs or build it from scratch. Helps that it doesn't use continuation characters so cut and past just works, there are lots of little things that make vim live more comfortably side by side with modern GUI life than emacs does. |
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Years ago I stopped typing anything longer than three words in anything but my editor, I just don't even understand why every programmer doesn't do that - it just makes perfect sense. The idea of automating copy+paste from any program into your editor and back is such an obvious thing, it feels stupid if you're not doing that.
> there are lots of little things that make vim live more comfortably side by side with modern GUI life than emacs does.
No disrespect, but honestly it sounds like you have never experienced the practical side of a Lisp system that permeates your OS. You just can't meaningfully compare Vim (or pretty much any other text editor) and Emacs, because Emacs is not a text editor, it's rather a text orchestrator. I for example easily build such workflows like "grab the url from one of my browser tabs and insert it", or I can get it from my browser history, or "retrive current thread I see in Slack and search for specific piece of text". Or placing the cursor to the plain text like "FOO-4142" immediately gets pattern matched and I see the popup with the Jira ticket description. That all I do in the middle of typing any text, like for example this very comment. I don't have to leave my editor, I'm not forced to do things how they dictated by other apps.
I use Neovim almost daily, it comes in handy for quick text editing in the terminal, and I love the idea of Vim in general - it's a beautiful, practical, amazing model and I use it everywhere, it permeates my OS - my WM, all my editors, my terminal and my browsers. But Neovim just can't be like Emacs, because fundamentally they are categorically incomparable. In practice that means that the "comfortably side by side" reach you're trying to describe goes further, because of affordances - building specific workflows that affect things on your local and remote machines is cheaper, quicker and simpler. I would grab any area of my screen and it gets immediately OCRed and extracted text pops in an Emacs buffer. It took me fifteen minutes to build that workflow. Getting done anything similar in pretty much any other editor wouldn't even occur to me - I wouldn't even bother seeing it as a problem that needs solving. Affordances shape the way you do things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876315