this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
345 points (90.2% liked)
Programmer Humor
31998 readers
385 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Church of Emacs vs. Cult of vi is the only true rivalry. Enlightenment will only be found taking one of these paths.
As an old coder this is the only religious war worth having. ๐
(Totally church of vi btw)
I'm an old emacs warrior, tired of the war. I'm Church of Emacs, but why? I don't know what I don't know about the advantages of vi/vim, I only know that when I see other coders use them, they seem to weave the magic about as well as I do.
I know that I have a ton of built-up configuration code that makes emacs the perfect editor for me. I know that I can't imagine using git much without magit, or how I would organize anything without org-mode, or how I could tolerate the frustration of editing in a container on a remote server without tramp. I know that I have a huge familiarity bias.
I know that whenever I see anybody with with any of these flashy new-fangled editors, they spend most of their time futzing around with dials and buttons and other gadgets, and thinking about how cool it all is, rather than thinking about the code. They start projects really quickly, they handle some refactoring edge cases slightly faster, but they take forever to do any real work, and are completely unprepared to do anything with a new language or text structure at all.
I say: Vim and Emacs against the world.
I'm still trying out different editors from time to time. I always feel like they are lacking in some way in comparison to Emacs. Like, when there's no key binding to focus the list of references, or one cannot navigate to the beginning of a block, or one cannot navigate by subword. Let's not forget sexp. Cannot live without it. Or marks, for that matter. Or proper clipboard history that is properly searchable. It's like the developers has not seen the light yet. Most editors are very mouse driven, and maybe does not focus enough on actual code navigation. I'm biased of course. Though, Helix seems cool.
Side note: Even though I use Emacs, I have nothing against Vim. Heck, I even use it every now and then.