> Arguing that Vim or Neovim run faster than Emacs is like saying that your single-engine sport aircraft moves faster than my best aircraft carrier.
Vim vs. Emacs debates these days remind me of a story I read about an F-16 pilot and an A-10 Warthog pilot sitting in a bar, debating the merits of their respective planes. At one point the F-16 pilot said something like "Come on, you have to admit that an F-16 with AIM-9 Sidewinders on its pylons is pretty badass!"
The Warthog pilot just smiled. "Do you know what the pylons on my 'Hog are meant to carry?" he said. "F-16s."
I've long considered Emacs to be the Warthog of editors: big, ugly, a little outdated, but absolutely your best friend when it comes to certain big ugly jobs (and nothing else comes close). These days it comes with a pretty decent implementation of much of Vim, so it really is like a Warthog carrying a pair of F-16s. That said, it also has in common with the Warthog that its number is coming up and it is probably soon to be retired permanently because the landscape has evolved out from underneath it.
> What people very often miss is that both Vim and Emacs are absolutely free. Free to use, free to copy, free to change. And that freedom is worth protecting and worth fighting for. Because no matter how MSFT, JetBrains, et al. paint it - VSCode and IntelliJ are not free products. And not just the money at stake here - the entire ideology and the idea of being a hacker with control over computational power and the tools is something worth protecting. I (just like many others) am so fed up with proprietary services and corporations taking your data hostage. Tired of being locked in and losing control over my data; tired of the status quo, of that infamous: "people don't know what they want..."
Most developers use Visual Studio Code. IntelliJ is still largely considered a must for development in Java-family languages. Microsoft and JetBrains are doing something right. It may be the case that people really don't know what they want. Whatever the case, if you work as a professional and do not use the tools that maximize your productivity, you are leaving money on the table.
> That said, it also has in common with the Warthog that its number is coming up and it is probably soon to be retired permanently because the landscape has evolved out from underneath it.
Do you think so?
Unlike the Warthog, Emacs has also been evolving. Doesn’t LSP close a large part of the gap with IDEs?
Emacs still has no parallel multithreading, very poor async support, lots of global state everywhere, and you still have to contend with Emacs Lisp. So no, I say it hasn't evolved to keep up with the state of the art.
Vim vs. Emacs debates these days remind me of a story I read about an F-16 pilot and an A-10 Warthog pilot sitting in a bar, debating the merits of their respective planes. At one point the F-16 pilot said something like "Come on, you have to admit that an F-16 with AIM-9 Sidewinders on its pylons is pretty badass!"
The Warthog pilot just smiled. "Do you know what the pylons on my 'Hog are meant to carry?" he said. "F-16s."
I've long considered Emacs to be the Warthog of editors: big, ugly, a little outdated, but absolutely your best friend when it comes to certain big ugly jobs (and nothing else comes close). These days it comes with a pretty decent implementation of much of Vim, so it really is like a Warthog carrying a pair of F-16s. That said, it also has in common with the Warthog that its number is coming up and it is probably soon to be retired permanently because the landscape has evolved out from underneath it.
> What people very often miss is that both Vim and Emacs are absolutely free. Free to use, free to copy, free to change. And that freedom is worth protecting and worth fighting for. Because no matter how MSFT, JetBrains, et al. paint it - VSCode and IntelliJ are not free products. And not just the money at stake here - the entire ideology and the idea of being a hacker with control over computational power and the tools is something worth protecting. I (just like many others) am so fed up with proprietary services and corporations taking your data hostage. Tired of being locked in and losing control over my data; tired of the status quo, of that infamous: "people don't know what they want..."
Most developers use Visual Studio Code. IntelliJ is still largely considered a must for development in Java-family languages. Microsoft and JetBrains are doing something right. It may be the case that people really don't know what they want. Whatever the case, if you work as a professional and do not use the tools that maximize your productivity, you are leaving money on the table.