I read up on this editor a little bit, but the thing that gets me is: what's wrong with emacs? I don't see anything this editor does that emacs can't do.
It has sensible defaults, and there is not much need to configure stuff.
It has a really "standard" interface (e.g. Tabs, Ctrl+PageUp/PageDn to switch between them, Ctrl+XCV for Clipboard, on Mac it uses the corresponding modifier keys instead). Emacs is rather idiosyncratic, to put it mildly.
It is prettier, and it's easier to install pretty themes (although not perfect yet), and while that may sound petty, it is important if you stare at it the whole day. I found you can make emacs look nice, but there was always some things that annoyed me.
Most importantly, antialiased fonts didn't work on some platforms (I'm sure you can make it work everywhere with some effort though). With sublime, you get native looking, readable fonts on every platform.
You have extensibility, but not so much that you can easily break the editor. The LISP environment in emacs is not beneficial for me, but rather a source of problems. Though, I would like a tiny bit more configurability in sublime - mainly the ability to place icons in the sidebar.
Last but not least, it has the killer feature of multiple selections (Ctrl+D). This allows you to do many cool editing maneuvers that you would use special emacs commands, key combos, regexes etc. (or in vi: movement combinations), but with just one simple key combo + cursor keys + shift, and most important, interactively. You don't have to think "I want to select this and that, but not that" before you press the buttons, you can "just do it".
Of course, emacs can do some things sublime can't. Extreme extensibility is one, but that's not important to me. More important is that it can run in a terminal (e.g. over ssh). It also has the ability to use different fonts and to embed images in its editor (useful for LaTeX).
It's not that there is anything emacs can't do that sublime can. Sublime is just more pleasant to use in my opinion.
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IMHO there is no justification nowadays for most apps to not work instantaneously, given how fast computers are. If you have to initialize stuff, do it at install time, not at startup time. I want to click the button and have the gui immediately there. Interestingly, emacs pioneered this. IIRC, it has a function to dump its memory to disc, and to just load the memory image at startup.
To understand what's wrong with emacs pretend that you are a new user that doesn't know emacs, but is familiar with editors in browsers, and other places ordinary people use.
When you start to use emacs everything will be wrong, the few shortcuts you know such as ctrl-c/v/x/z/f will do strange things, scrolling won't move text smoothly like other programs but will jump several lines always keeping first line exactly aligned, so you feel lost all the time.
When you select something and scroll emacs will destroy the selection and keep cursor in viewport (i am still not sure if this is a feature, or just a glaring bug that no one cares to fix).
Now you try sublime and it is beautiful! It comes with beautiful theme, beautiful chrome-like tabs (they even scroll!), fantastic smooth scrolling, pretty minimap that helps you see whole document at once, built in fuzzy search, and easily configurable plugins.
Why would you even try learning emacs where you constantly feel lost, instead of sublime which makes you feel powerful?
> I don't see anything this editor does that emacs can't do.
in short it's not only important to do something, but do it with style;)
Ok, as I am an emacs user, I somewhat see your point. But the counterpoint is that most hackers spend a good part of their day on text editors and ide's, so it's not unreasonable to spend some time learning it for greater productivity gains later. Yes, there is a greater learning curve with emacs, but it seems to be more extensible than any other editors out there. The ctrl-c/v/x/z/f shortcuts can easily be remapped, the minimap module is available, as well as multiple cursors. That's the great thign about emacs, it can be extended to do just about anything.
It reminds me of a quote from the great Marvin Minsky: “A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.”
I agree that extensibility is a great thing, that's why i spent some time learning emacs. But unfortunately no amount of elisp could fix the bugs in core: jumpy scrolling, and keeping cursor always on screen. And more importantly after some time it turned out that i used all that extensibility mostly to get on par with other editors, so to me emacs felt more like a construction kit for a violin rather than an actual violin.
Hopefully new generation of browser based editors like cloud9 or atom will provide extenibility similar to emacs, but will start from more sensible place.
2) I don't consider Emacs Lisp a great Lisp either.
3) Even more fundamentaly, I don't think the kind of hooks Emacs offers for extensibility, with the modes etc, are to my liking, especially in how the interoporate with the visual representation.
4) And I'd rather, personally, use Python for my plugins.
One of the problems is that it's a terrible Lisp and runtime. If it was at least a Scheme, there would be less complaining. Also, Lisps aren't popular, as you surely know.
The display technology assumes a text terminal, just like vim. There are many things you can't do with that which are easy with a proper GUI.
Actually the Lisp runtime of GNU Emacs is not terrible. It's just that there are a few better in the Lisp world. Some of the things in Emacs Lisp are there by design.
> The display technology assumes a text terminal,
GNU Emacs and Xemacs have a lot of support for non-text-terminal displays.
Sublime feels more lightweight and faster.
It has sensible defaults, and there is not much need to configure stuff.
It has a really "standard" interface (e.g. Tabs, Ctrl+PageUp/PageDn to switch between them, Ctrl+XCV for Clipboard, on Mac it uses the corresponding modifier keys instead). Emacs is rather idiosyncratic, to put it mildly.
It is prettier, and it's easier to install pretty themes (although not perfect yet), and while that may sound petty, it is important if you stare at it the whole day. I found you can make emacs look nice, but there was always some things that annoyed me.
Most importantly, antialiased fonts didn't work on some platforms (I'm sure you can make it work everywhere with some effort though). With sublime, you get native looking, readable fonts on every platform.
You have extensibility, but not so much that you can easily break the editor. The LISP environment in emacs is not beneficial for me, but rather a source of problems. Though, I would like a tiny bit more configurability in sublime - mainly the ability to place icons in the sidebar.
Last but not least, it has the killer feature of multiple selections (Ctrl+D). This allows you to do many cool editing maneuvers that you would use special emacs commands, key combos, regexes etc. (or in vi: movement combinations), but with just one simple key combo + cursor keys + shift, and most important, interactively. You don't have to think "I want to select this and that, but not that" before you press the buttons, you can "just do it".
Of course, emacs can do some things sublime can't. Extreme extensibility is one, but that's not important to me. More important is that it can run in a terminal (e.g. over ssh). It also has the ability to use different fonts and to embed images in its editor (useful for LaTeX).
It's not that there is anything emacs can't do that sublime can. Sublime is just more pleasant to use in my opinion.
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IMHO there is no justification nowadays for most apps to not work instantaneously, given how fast computers are. If you have to initialize stuff, do it at install time, not at startup time. I want to click the button and have the gui immediately there. Interestingly, emacs pioneered this. IIRC, it has a function to dump its memory to disc, and to just load the memory image at startup.