What side of the editor war do you lie? vi, Emacs, or maybe something newer like neovim, nano, or VS-Codium?

  • mrshll1001
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    2 years ago

    Vim most closely matches how I like to work and the featureset that I need so I use it for basically everything: scripting/programming, markdown, JSON Schema work, lightweight CSV work, config files, etc. I mostly use basic features that are built in – I think the only plugins I have for it are Goyo, for editing larger quantities of text, and maybe some Markdown-language highlighting/features which isn’t built into the base program.

    I am neutral about Neovim. I like that it exists, but there’s nothing it would add for my use cases so I just install Vim.

    I would love to learn a bit of Emacs, especially as I am a bit of a FSF / GPL diehard. I wish there was a GNU Vim clone (I feel Nano is a bit different) or that Vim was released under the GPL rather than its own. Although I am given to understand that it is somewhat copyleft (source). I think Emacs’ nature as a power LISP machine is really interesting, but it just doesn’t match with the way I work via a Window Manager+terminals/vim. Adding an Emacs layer on top of that just doesn’t make sense for me. If there was a desktop environment or window manager that was basically “Emacs”, I’d consider giving it a go.

    I avoid Electron apps where possible because they’re heavy on system resources but I have fond memories of Atom from when it came out (although Microsoft have abandoned it because they’ve sold everyone on VS-Code). For people just getting into doing things via a text editor I usually recommend its community fork, Pulsar.

    • animated ring
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      2 years ago

      If there was a desktop environment or window manager that was basically “Emacs”, I’d consider giving it a go.

      I mean, there is EXWM

      • mrshll1001
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        2 years ago

        Ooh, thanks for the rec! I’ll give it a go when I’m ready to start playing with Emacs.