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Ask HN: Have you gone from Editor A to Editor B and then back to Editor A? Why?

1 pointsby chriszhangover 4 years ago
A can be anything - vim, emacs, vscode.<p>B can also be anything.<p>So I want to know if you were a big constant user of something (like Vim) for many years and then you went from Vim to Vscode for some years but returned to Vim again.<p>If you went this path can you share your experiences? Why you left Editor A first? Why you returned to it again?

2 comments

bitwizeover 4 years ago
I keep trying VSCode out and being drawn back to Emacs. It&#x27;s happened several times. Most recently I forswore Emacs for several weeks to use VSCode and IDEs instead.<p>Now I&#x27;m back on Emacs.<p>Part of the problem is, Emacs does so many things right. It does electric indent right. It does bracket matching right. It does visiting a new file right. And VSCode gets them wrong, but so do most editors. The thing that drove me to quit VSCode altogether was the fact that when you use File &#x2F; Open in VSCode, it clobbers the ENTIRE editor state in that window -- terminal, output, and all.<p>Maybe this behavior can be changed via a configuration setting. I don&#x27;t know. But the fact that some smoothbrain at Microsoft decided that this should be the default, that opening a file with the menu should start a new editor session and clobber your old (unless you had the forethought to spawn a new window first) tells me a lot about how much the VSCode team do not grok the ergonomics of how developers work in the real world.<p>So back to Emacs, whose UI is not &quot;modern&quot; but is nevertheless timeless, because it&#x27;s been shaped by the experience of decades of the world&#x27;s best hackers doing real work in it.
simonblackover 4 years ago
I did something slightly different. In the early days of computing, using CP&#x2F;M, I found WordStar and used it happily for years.<p>When the IBM-PC came out, there was a version of WordStar for that so I continued using it. Later on, I used Linux which has a &#x27;joe&#x27; editor which has an alter-ego called &#x27;jstar&#x27;.<p>Yep. &#x27;jstar&#x27; is a WordStar clone, and that&#x27;s what I still use now, 35 years after I first found WordStar. I even renamed it to &#x27;ws&#x27;.