Still figuring out if this is satire or not... A lot of people still have strong feelings here

I’m pretty sure it is satire with a strong helping of “much truth in jest.”

I wasn't sure either. I clicked on the disclaimer link to find out.

Rest assured, no unix engineers were harmed in the making of this new post.

At first I thought this was about the recent "controversy" on the postfix users mailing list, wherein several times in ~6 months people have asked that the site properly support HTTPS and been shouted down by angry people who say that it's pointless; Wietse and Viktor have refused to say anything more than "our hosting agreement doesn't include HTTPS."

I for one can't wait for these people to retire. Seriously, the world moved on from this "debate" several decades ago (well, most of the world has - there are still people who are fiercely passionate about this non-issue). I happen to use emacs. Do you happen to use and prefer vi? Great! I don't care. You do you. We can even pair program together! It's not like I'm going to die when you launch vi!

But have you noticed how he got CFO attention with single replica? Such talent should be used in sales :-), or at least for the training of sales teams. "No Time To Retire" ...

I started to use vim because I needed a CLI editor that is powerful and bloat-free. Emacs seemed too much feature creep to me.

I'm not a fanatic, I'm skeptical about the tools I use and I'm feeling like moving to an ide like Vscode because they seem being much more productive to working with large codebases(has built-in source code navigation tools, etc).

Bill, is that you? I used to work for a guy who got really angry when we switched to linux and ls did color. I had to show him how to unalias ls.

Seems that some people are get angry in the other direction as I'm getting downvotes.

Read the whole article, still not sure which one should I use. Can someone enlighten me?

Well, since busybox containers have neither I just use cat - > target.sh copy-paste the thing then Ctrl-D.

Much cleaner, simpler experience compared to VSCode's SFTP plugin, that - for some reason - always logs an error, even though the upload completed successfully...

Busybox vi is definitely a thing … but even then it probably has ed.

You could use emacs to connect over ssh. ;)

I recommend unix ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

Use Nano.

yes it's emacs ;-)

Emacs, in Vi mode :-)

http://www.billharlan.com/emacs/#:~:text=You%20can%20switch%....

kakoune

If I had to, if I absolutely had to, I could stop using vim. But the more I use, the more I can do with it.

But do I care what someone else uses? Nope. Not a whit. Not even a little bit.

A colleague with whom I work very closely is VScode guy. He can make it do it impressive things. We chide each other from time to time.

But neither of us cares. What we care about is the code we write using these tools.

We both have our favourites in the garage as well, but those tools are irrelevant by the time we get to the rocks and camber. What matters is the work, not how the work was done.

I find it normal that people are attached to something like an editor, or a font.

I started to administer unix machines early 90's. Vi had always been a shitshow for me and I loved the editor joe. Then pico. Then nano. Then graphical ones. Today vscode.

I am amazed how people use vi and the speed they get from it (honestly). When I ssh or docker exec, I am happy to know i, a and :q! in vi.

What I do not like, though, is someone telling me that my editor is wrong and theirs is the right one.

Someone showing me their editor/font/ whatever useful software is a godsend. I learned so much from these people.

Is there a The Onion equivalent for programming and engineering related news?

Apparently, we don't need it...

Some subreddit somewhere. [https://thedailywtf.com] is good for reality-based humor.

N-Gate is! They directly make fun of “Hacker” “News” and its brogrammer circle jerk bike shedding.

Heads up though, their stuff up to 1-2 years ago is a lot funnier than now. Also they’re a lot less active.

http://n-gate.com/

That's because HN had a lot more satire-worthy content few years ago. I feel people started moderating themselves mainly in response to ngate

Like, "Rust evangelism strike force" was coined by ngate and we don't see them that often anymore

> Like, "Rust evangelism strike force" was coined by ngate and we don't see them that often anymore

Is that because of self-moderation or is it because Rust isn't at the peak of its hype cycle anymore?

I don’t check figures, but Rust hype feels ever lasting….

What the hell is wrong with clickbait titles on HN lately?

I'm one of them.

I don't really know why anyone in their right mind would use emacs, but it isn't like it costs anything but a minuscule amount of disk space to keep it around, so who cares? The war is over now we must all ally against VSCode and any other web-browser-as-a-text-editor monstrosities. Except nano users, they don't get a vote.

I find VScode really slows me down. Gotta WIMP things that are 'wired' from my brain to the kbd via emacs. I honestly do not at all understand why anybody would use VScode except to cut people's productivity. At least, for me, anyway. I work in the embedded space, so C on the metal, and lots of python elsewhere.

I prefer vim, but some things VSCode has going for it:

* The plugin system seems fairly decent, and given it's popularity, there's usually a plugin for most things. There's a decent vim-mode plugin, linters that would take me a while to get working in my .vimrc, etc.

* It is fundamentally closer to a text editor than an IDE, so it'll do sane things like give you the option to use the system's python installation rather than some janky, ancient built-in version.

I dunno. I tutor for an intro programming class, getting them to install anything or work on the command line can be an uphill battle, VSCode is the best editor that will get widespread adoption in that kind of environment I think.

I use neovim in VSCode. My setup is neovim (via brew) + VSCode + VSCode Neovim (extension) + clangd (as a language server) with which I am extremely happy.

Would you mind sharing your setup?

MacBook Air

  install VSCode
  brew install nvim
  install XCode command line utils for clangd
    alternatively, install clang with brew
  in VSCode install the clangd VSCode extension
  in VSCode install VSCode Neovim extension

There's one bug that annoys me and I think it's a VSCode bug. You can navigate right by hitting the space bar. But tapping it multiple times corrupts the line buffer. This doesn't happen with right arrow.

So is Vim just run in one of VSCode's terminals?

What's VSCode providing here compared to something like a terminal with tmux?

In the olden times, it was Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.

My fav was "Emacs Makes A Computer Slow" ... though, that was 20 years ago :-D

And today it's Generally Not Used Except by Middle Aged Computer Scientists.

literally true; my first linux box didn't fly until I upgraded from 4MB to 16, at which point I could run emacs, g++, a shell, and X windows at the same time.

Eight megabytes sounds svelte these days.

I use it because I hate vim and need a decent CLI based editor when I ssh into machines.

That is becomming less and less common though with good deployment tools.

Once you learn the shortcuts it's hard to unlearn them. And they work in every text field on Linux if you set the option.

Isn't VSCode built with electron?

Yeah exactly, a web-browser-as-a-text-editor.

You can run in browser as well

https://vscode.dev/

Talk about bloat - so we now need to install another mini os in our os to run a text editor? :)

As long as you're not shelling out money for JB bloatware use what you like.

They are both wrong. Pico/nano.

No, ed. The standard editor.

Wtf, just punch holes in the cards like the rest of us, billy!

?

joke was the default error message in ed is `?`

Ah! My lack of beard is showing! Oh noes :))) Thanks for the explanation!

This human gets it

Nano gang rep

Not that I actually use it for anything substantial, I just prefer it over vi for quick edits

haha the estranged faces I get when I fire up nano on a remote server. For crying out loud people... I'm going to comment a single line; stop vanitizing your hotfix routine by enforcing some self-made requirement of only using one single editor

Nano is nearly ubiquitous making it great for these small edits, and it was easy to pick up as it has the common key combos listed at the bottom of the screen. When I was learning Linux this made things smoother than they could have been with other CLI editors. Vi took me a while to get used to and I had to look up commands, but I still install nano when I need it.

I get lost when working on centos.

-bash: nano: command not found

-bash: apt: command not found

~OS swap was highly effective, sysadmin is confused~

(Yes this is a joke)

I use nano exclusively for my live server code edits.

You can pry vim from my cold dead hands.

But truthfully, I can't imagine life without vim. How do you read or edit files on remote servers? Or in a docker container locally?

How do you just open all recently edited files without vim -p $(git diff HEAD^ --name-only) ? I'd feel so lost without it.

VSCode shows the staged and uncommitted files, and navigating between files with Ctlr-P is pretty neat, and running commands with Ctrl-Shift-P is also helps with keeping your hands off the rodent device.

Sublime Text is a commercial text editor. I used it during university, but it honestly just feels weird now to consider daily-driving a non-free (as in freedom and free beer, honesty mainly free beer) text editor when there are so many free alternatives out there. I don’t understand why someone would use Sublime Text instead of VSCode today.

I got into Emacs because it seemed like a neat thing to do. I don’t proselytise people to Emacs because learning it is a time-sink and the return you get is only realised if you really embrace a fully text-based interface, which can be hard and sometimes feels pointless.

That being said, it is my IDE (lsp-mode) for all languages and my git client (magit), and while I have not been able to make effective use of most other features in Emacs (org-mode, email clients, eww, etc.), these two things alone pay for themselves in spades. The learning curve is real, but the idea that you have to spend ages configuring your text editor is only true if you don’t use one of the many excellent distributions out there like Spacemacs, Doom, and Prelude.

I also use Vi keybindings (evil) because Vim is ubiquitous, and all the things people said about modal editing being a boon to productivity and helping you prevent RSI (which Emacs keybindings did not help with at all). I think Nano is awesome, but I never made it my go-to because it didn’t come installed by default on the old RHEL VMs I managed, while an old version it Vim did - go figure.

I used Sublime from 2012-2014, then briefly Atom, then Jetbrains, then ended up with Vim for the past four years.

It's sped me up a bit for sure, but even more importantly is that it's done wonders for my RSI. With the amount of time I've spent using non-ergonomic laptops over the past 12 years, even typing was pretty painful for a while. After minimizing my mouse usage, getting a Kenisis keyboard and my wrists starting getting better. The ergonomic keyboard helped, but VIM definitely has also. Whatever editor I work with, I configure it so I can use VIM bindings.

Acme FTW!

Yes YES!!!