informat IDE survey

[Andreas Leitgeb]

Not so! It has a vi mode.
(Seriously. It does.)

Is it a bare-bones vi mode, or rather something like a vim mode?

Unlike modern versions of "vim", the classic "vi" doesn't really qualify
for "decent", either, anymore. At least not for my own definition of decent.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

What's so tricky about appending "&> out.txt" to your command line?

I want to edit the text. That’s what a text editor does.

 

[Roedy Green]

And that's different from an IDE how?

I have not used Emacs for many years. but back in the day, even the
way you selected text with the mouse was different. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V
worked a quite different way with different keystrokes. These are
things I don't want to think about. I want them as finger reflexes.
Flipping back and forth between the CUA interface and the Emacs
interface requires conscious thought for every tiny operation. It
drove me mad. I figured the only way out would be to forswear ever
using Windows again in return for having a LISP amanunesis at my
shoulder. Since my customers used Windows I could not consider doing
that.

Perhaps now it has a more native windows-like interface.

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

Now, if only I could break my habit of typing ctrl-c ctrl-c to send an
email message in gmail...

There exists an extension for firefox, that adds a small extra button
to each textfield, allowing you to open the contents of the textfield
as a temp-file in any (configurable) editor, and if firefox notices
changes in that temp-file (due to saving in the editor), it will load
them back into the textfield. (It does not care if the editor itself
still runs or not, so even if the editor forks itself into background
on start, that doesn't matter)

Maybe that would be the key to allow you to use even emacs with gmail
(if you actually use the web-interface to it).

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

I don't know, I'm afraid. I've never used vi(m) much.
(The emacs mode mentioned is
http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/RZ/software/emacs/vip/vip_toc.html ,
but I don't know if that answers your question.)

Yes, it does. It seems to be indeed more decent than classical "vi".

So, it seems that the lack of a decent editor in emacs is no longer
(since about 2002, the date of the linked document) accurate.