This is why, when I’m training new sysadmins in Linux, I get them on vi/vim as early as possible.
Other editors are nice, but when things go pear shaped, vi is there for you
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/rant
Eclipse is a crime against humanity.
It’s painful in any possible way*.
I have been a staunch emacs devotee for exactly a quarter of a century (my god!), until Visual Studio Code came out in 2015.
I had invested a lot in my emacs-fu, but the switching (out of curiosity, in the beginning) has been almost painless, and lends weight to the notion that a well designed multi platform* IDE/text editor does not have that much of a learning curve.
*My personal IDE/editor chart:
- Visual Studio (both full and Code)
- emacs
- …
copy con file.txt(orcat > file.txt)- Harry Potter Black Quill of punishment
- Eclipse
** I regularly use it on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and sporadically on Mac.
I have this feeling you are .NET programmer.
I personally don’t like Eclipse but it doesn’t bother me unless people are creating builds that depend on it. Builds should always be IDE agnostic. The vim and emacs users should always be able to just straightforwardly edit and build from a command line. The Netbeans users should be able to click run and have it do the same thing that it would do in IntelliJ. I don’t remember feeling like this was the case for C++ builds in Visual. It wasn’t like you could take a Visual C++ build and just type “make” on the command line and expect it to work. If this has improved or changed, I’m glad of it.
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Watch your tongue!
This affront can only be washed with NIST SP-800-88, tomorrow at 7AM behind the Discalced Programmers’ Convent. Bring your favourite compiler.
Unsticking the tongue from my cheek, that’s the only thing I disagree with in your post.
In fact, I mostly code for small embedded systems and make sure to depend on universal tools, available everywhere (typically: Cmake, ninja, clang/gcc), for the builds and never on a specific IDE.
VS Code, as emacs, easily integrates with this model. Visual Studio, apart being only available on Windows, a bit less - but, to address your concern, Cmake support is more than decent.
Unfortunately, many vendors try to push you in their freeopietary Eclipse IDE du jour.
Full disclosure: I have written exactly one .NET program in my life (a hardware watchdog Windows service in C#) and I admit I liked it.
Why I hate Eclipse #1027: It freaking takes about 30 s to open and load a project on a 5900X with NVME, compared to <1 s for VS Code and ~4 s for the full Visual Studio (same project loaded from the same dir).
My sincere apologies.
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I’ve found that with modern web-pages, between this “infinity long ever growing page” crap which has taken over the web (including BBS), and this weird fetish web designers have taken up about eliminating functioning scroll bars, I usually have to resort to keyboard just to read a webpage, as the “up” and “down” keys on the keyboard are the only way to scroll down the page.
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Keyboard shortcuts can be fun to use for the sheer wow factor among the less-techy.
I now work in a quite low-end job at ups at the mo. (but the nightime hours paying lots plus near-fully secure employment in brexit Britain makes it very worthwhile)
I’m roughly considered a tech-ninja due to being able to sign-in/out in seconds using the keyboard only. Amuses me greatly 
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Regarding the trackpoint, for small adjustments* it’s amazing, as you don’t need to move your hands from the keybaord at all.
For more mainstream applications/games an external mouse is vastly superior
*on a slight tangent, this is part of the reason i’m looking forwards to Valve’s steamdeck console, it’s two mini trackpads should provide similar uselfulness
If i were to rate them on usefulness…
- External mouse (usb/bluetooth)
- Trackpoint mouse
- Touchscreen
- Touchpad (i just disable this in the BIOS on my laptop)
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How many of them are trying to sneak under a page limit? (I’m currently looking for shorter synonyms to fix a trailing word in a paragraph so that the next paragraph moves up a page and I can get under 5 pages.)
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One thing that keeps me going back to emacs are keyboard macros. I haven’t found anything else that does them. A little C-x ( do some stuff C-x ) C-u bignumber C-x e can go a long way when you have to do something that’s a little bit more complicated than search and replace.
So I end up using both emacs and vscode and pycharm and switching whenever the one that I’m using right now can’t do what I want.
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where does atom lie?
I found it as slow as molasses-- I now edit python, etc in VS Code.
Did anyone ever have success with the Netbeans emacs keybinding plugin?
This is true, and practically the only thing I really miss.
That said, the flexible and powerful support of multiple cursors and selections has replaced about 90% of what I needed Ctrl-X ( … Ctrl-X ) for.
@jerwin:
I wouldn’t know: I only tried it briefly when moving from emacs to VSC (as they are supposedly similar), as you I only noticed it felt slow and never came back.
None; we have no page limits. Mainly they seem to be trying to make the output look a certain way, but that’s a waste of everyone’s time, since the final output will always look different. (Our fonts are slightly different, and in final production we add things like logos and paper headers, all of which change the spacing significantly.) We do eliminate orphan lines, broken margins, and similar artifacts at the final editing stage in our own way.
In some cases authors seem to want to use the way they structure things as a form of personal expression. That’s fine for something which is all about you (like a textbook or monograph), but doesn’t make much sense for a paper in a research math journal. The consumers of the article don’t want the layout to get in the way of the reading.
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Mouse wheel??? (I would never use a mouse without one.)
Nano users unite!
Three decade Mac user here, and way more keyboard-oriented than any Windows user I’ve seen in meatspace.
Moving everything to the browser ensures that us old folks honing any non-mouse abilities are just wasting cycles.
I used a unicomp enduro for about a year. That’s a buckling spring keyboard with a trackpoint.
Love the keys, trackpoint didn’t move me, but it doesn’t get in the way so why not?
I am currently transitioning to an ergo planck ez. Great quality, and infinitely programmable including the most extensive keyboard-based mouse function I have ever seen, which I have not tried yet.
Still not sure what to make of ortholinear, except that it’s not a step backwards for me. People with large hands might feel differently.
Which is easier, learning 10 different software packages, one after the other, or learning emacs once? Pick one and stick with it you say? That’s what I was trying to do.
Being long-lived enough to enable that question is a very under-sold advantage for software. In 1996 Red Hat 4.0 was a ridiculously better operating system than Windows NT. I contend that anyone who learned RH4 would be fine with a current distro. Relearning Windows 7 or 8 times has to count as the least of the horrors of the last 25 years of Windows use. Nothing learned while learning Linux is a waste of time.
I have found ease of use to be kind of an illusion. Ease drops off quickly. What also drops off is depth, because most software isn’t around long enough to get deep.
In the universe of IT, what are the number of things 30 or more years old and still being used, more importantly still being developed and refined? A geriatric-jerk users club definitely helps with that kind of longevity (being a member of that club is part of the aesthetic for me), but doesn’t completely explain it. Not many things in IT can be called time-tested.
As I alluded to in my earlier comment, I am learning emacs late in life, and I am explicitly not learning for development, but to use as my default user interface.
My Ubuntu GUI desktop is resource-sucking information desert just like my last Windows desktop. I go back and forth to a blank page in between seeing useful stuff.
What I see in emacs and its flavors now, is 30+ years of experimentation and tweaking following a different path.
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If you’re messing with i3, you should take a look at regolith - it’s an i3-based desktop distro. You can just add their repos to your ubuntu setup and install it - they set up i3 and a compositor and a bunch of the gnome backend stuff for you.
