What are the efficiencies afforded by Emacs or Vim vs Eclipse?
eclipse, emacs, vim
Solution
I got started in IDEs like Eclipse, but switched to Vim about 2 years ago.
Reasons you may want to use a text-mode editor:
- It can be used as an IDE for just about any language (you learn it once and use it for everything)
- It can do all those fancy things like auto-completion, refactoring and many more complex operations, which you can extend by adding macros or plug-ins
- It works just about everywhere (and can be used through an SSH shell)
- You don't need a GB of ram to run it
If you really persevere, you will find that working in an editor like this will eventually be faster, and in fact becomes ingrained as a sort of 'muscle memory'. This means you can code without slowing down to think about the process.
Problem
I started coding around 5 years ago. I was introduced through Java and Eclipse which both have substantial stigma attached in the programming community. A number of people at the company I currently intern at prefer emacs or vim. I can't see how a basic text editor is faster or easier than an IDE in general although I appreciate some things like building tend to be faster from the command line. Is this a case of the 'old-boys' club or can it be more efficient to program a project in this way? Can you provide some use cases to demonstrate? If I were advocating Eclipse I'd say refactoring and auto-completion were pretty handy tools. Gav