this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Church of Emacs vs. Cult of vi is the only true rivalry. Enlightenment will only be found taking one of these paths.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I recently learned there are people that think emacs and vi are bloated. They like acme or sam or something. Iceberg is so deep.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Ed users have not found the internet yet, otherwise they'd be in the war too

[–] UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

"Ed", a.k.a. "edline" is a really old line by line editor in Unix.

[–] UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh my god someone finally fell for it! Please don't edit your comment, you just made my day

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I chose to respond to the most likely meaning as it's also the response with the greatest utility value for the average person coming across this thread.

Responding to it as an "ed" prompt is pretty useless in this context.

[–] UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Are you a Vulcan? O_o

Either way you have my thanks. Greatest utility value as well as greatest hilarity value!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

LOL!

It's been many years since I was so young that this was all it took to reach the level of hilarity.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Even Lynx is bloatware if you're a member of the Ed Sect.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

When you think of a bloated text editor, you would not expect VI to be that. If anything, it's closer to the opposite.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Check this out. It puts everything I thought that was, you know, more ethical to use to the harmful section and suggests some unknown and probably not very useful today stuff. Can someone explain if they have good points or not?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Unclear. They don't give their reasoning beyond "complicated = bad", and very specifically leave it up to the imagination of the reader.

While they make some interesting points with regards to overcomplication and scope creep, there are also good reasons why we're still not using programs like ed as text editors, such as it being arcane and unintuitive.

vi will at least helpfully point out :exit is not an editor command. Instead, ed will not-so-helpfully point out ?.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As an old coder this is the only religious war worth having. 😂

(Totally church of vi btw)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I hope that I live long enough to one day master either vim or emacs. Until then Unix is my IDE, and mind you, Sublime my editor. But I could immediately relate to people being distracted by their tools rather than focusing on their code. That's what I have observed a lot, it's a distraction from what matters most. Even code itself could be a distraction from more essential code. That's why I think, programmer should delete code constantly, until there is less code, or preferably no code.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The religious marriage to rule them all: doom Emacs (or other packages that do similar things). All the excellent text editing of vi/vi/vi/vim, the ecosystem and all the features of emacs.

For anyone who hasn't heard of doom Emacs, it's emacs with a lot of customizations baked into it, one of the biggest selling points is that everything uses vim keybinds now (where it makes sense). You get the amazing ecosystem of emacs with the ease of movement and editing of vim, plus a lot of other QOL features. It's also just vanilla emacs with pre-made (and easy to edit) config files and helper functions so you can move over existing stuff if you want, and you don't have to worry since all the emacs packages will still work, since it's still emacs

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Doom Emacs is the Emacs users that found their operating system, but are trying to stumble their way into a good text editor :)