Which text editor do you use and why?

[yuppie]

Vim.

It's in the terminal, where I spend half my time, I memorized the commands I use most frequently. Plenty of plugins. Easy.

[fleischverpackung]

I like the dark theme from visual studio

[Millsoncapo]

Sublime  +1

[rowdy]

Don't forget the "... and why" bit!

[SJHL]

Been using VIM at work. Confusing as heck in the beginning but after awhile, it isn't bad at all.

[Landcaps]

Sublime user here. very user friendly and great ui

[iLLucionist]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

[iLLucionist]

I use emacs because of the support for R through ESS mode.

I also like org mode, and the ability to use shells in buffers, and it has nice support for Clojure which I want to learn.

I also like how I can remap keys in init.el.

R in vim is far from perfect... VIM needs a proper REPL implementation. Perhaps neovim sometimes.

[iLLucionist]

Vim. All the thrusting way.

The first time I log on to a server or environment that's new to me I do:

inoremap kj <Esc>
inoremap jk <Esc>
nnoremap <Space> i

And that's about what I need from vanilla vim.

I use it literally for everything... prose, latex, python, html, js, css, yaml, rest, json, c, cpp, config, whatever.

But I must say seeing elisp made me hungry for more...

I really HATE vim in terms of consistency in the UI. Every plugin does things differently. It's a mess. For instance, I work in windows, and I have 3 monitors. I want vim to open every buffer in or below current window, not at the bottom of the whole effing screen. Why can't this be done? Can this be done in emacs?

[Zobeid Zuma]

TextWrangler on the Mac, because it's free and familiar.

Pluma on Ubuntu MATE, because it came with the distro.

Do not understand why anybody today would willingly use CLI-based editors like vim or emacs.  From where I sit, those relics from 1970s mainframe environments have been obsolete since about 1985 or so.  More than thirty years later, it seems like a lot of people still haven't got the memo.

[joey]

TextWrangler on the Mac, because it's free and familiar.

Pluma on Ubuntu MATE, because it came with the distro.

Do not understand why anybody today would willingly use CLI-based editors like vim or emacs.  From where I sit, those relics from 1970s mainframe environments have been obsolete since about 1985 or so.  More than thirty years later, it seems like a lot of people still haven't got the memo.

Because they work well for us

[Findecanor]

I like the way that when I encounter a text file in command-line mode, I can get edit it quickly right then and there and then get back to the command line.
Works over SSH as well without having to set up X forwarding.

Earlier this year, I did a pre-study to see how difficult it would be to write my own text editor. I found that you can actually write a text editor in text mode that uses the regular Mac/Windows/Amiga/GNOME/KDE conventions that are used in GUI programs. It could use Shift-<Arrow> to select, and Ctrl+X,C,V shortcuts etc.
It could also take mouse input for controlling menus, and in a modern terminal that supports Unicode, you could do some pretty but basic frames, scrollbars, menus and status bars.
The only real limit that I came across was that text-mode programs can't take Ctrl+Shift+<letter> shortcuts.

[iLLucionist]

I like the way that when I encounter a text file in command-line mode, I can get edit it quickly right then and there and then get back to the command line.
Works over SSH as well without having to set up X forwarding.

Earlier this year, I did a pre-study to see how difficult it would be to write my own text editor. I found that you can actually write a text editor in text mode that uses the regular Mac/Windows/Amiga/GNOME/KDE conventions that are used in GUI programs. It could use Shift-<Arrow> to select, and Ctrl+X,C,V shortcuts etc.
It could also take mouse input for controlling menus, and in a modern terminal that supports Unicode, you could do some pretty but basic frames, scrollbars, menus and status bars.
The only real limit that I came across was that text-mode programs can't take Ctrl+Shift+<letter> shortcuts.

That's really interesting. What programming language did you use?

[Findecanor]

What programming language did you use?

The programming language does not matter much as long as you can input and output ANSI codes, and Unicode if supported by the current locale. If you write in C (or a derivative), there is the widely supported ncurses library which has abstractions around ANSI codes and can manage a character buffer for full-screen programs.

I wanted to use Rust, as an exercise to learn it but I could not get Rust to work under 32-bit x86 Linux, so I wrote C++.

[joey]

I wanted to use Rust, as an exercise for learning it but I could not get Rust to work under 32-bit x86 Linux.

Why did you need to?

I wrote a ****ty editor in rust. It was ****ty.

[iLLucionist]

What programming language did you use?

The programming language does not matter much as long as you can input and output ANSI codes, and Unicode if supported by the current locale. If you write in C (or a derivative), there is the widely supported ncurses library which has abstractions around ANSI codes and can manage a character buffer for full-screen programs.

I wanted to use Rust, as an exercise to learn it but I could not get Rust to work under 32-bit x86 Linux, so I wrote C++.

But what about UTF-8? Isn't that a ***** in C/C++? Or are there good libraries for that now? Sorry, I'm not an C/C++ expert (I wish I were).

[iri]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

Yes you are. Install evil-mode and achieve satori.

[iLLucionist]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

Yes you are. Install evil-mode and achieve satori.

[Findecanor]

But what about UTF-8? Isn't that a ***** in C/C++? Or are there good libraries for that now? Sorry, I'm not an C/C++ expert (I wish I were).

That depends on what tradeoffs you have... Unicode and utf-8 is a standard but not particularly user-friendly or safe.
If all you want to do is support European languages in a character set that the current user has set up in his environment -- and allow that to be utf-8 -- then you can do that with libc: the easiest thing is to setlocale() to make the C library redirect to functions for the current character set; Then convert to/from wchar_t when loading and saving - with internal buffers in 32-bit wchar_t.
If you want to correctly handle right-to-left language text (Hebrew, Arabic), you will have to use an external library to move letters around and you can create a real mess for yourself. Right-to-left text could be confusing in a programmer's text editor though.

There are a bunch of other libraries for C++ that handle utf-8 and Unicode wchar_t in various ways. There is rudimentary utf-8 support in later version of C++ and more in Boost (which is almost standard).
However, I wanted my editor to be binary-safe (with the exception of really long lines) and to validate utf-8 and highlight incorrect/unsafe utf-8 sequences. I did not find any library that did that so I wrote my own. I have not got much further than that though.

[iLLucionist]

But what about UTF-8? Isn't that a ***** in C/C++? Or are there good libraries for that now? Sorry, I'm not an C/C++ expert (I wish I were).

That depends on what tradeoffs you have... Unicode and utf-8 is a standard but not particularly user-friendly or safe.
If all you want to do is support European languages in a character set that the current user has set up in his environment -- and allow that to be utf-8 -- then you can do that with libc: the easiest thing is to setlocale() to make the C library redirect to functions for the current character set; Then convert to/from wchar_t when loading and saving - with internal buffers in 32-bit wchar_t.
If you want to correctly handle right-to-left language text (Hebrew, Arabic), you will have to use an external library to move letters around and you can create a real mess for yourself. Right-to-left text could be confusing in a programmer's text editor though.

There are a bunch of other libraries for C++ that handle utf-8 and Unicode wchar_t in various ways. There is rudimentary utf-8 support in later version of C++ and more in Boost (which is almost standard).
However, I wanted my editor to be binary-safe (with the exception of really long lines) and to validate utf-8 and highlight incorrect/unsafe utf-8 sequences. I did not find any library that did that so I wrote my own. I have not got much further than that though.

Interesting. I still don't grasp the basics of UTF-8, I think that they actually should've provided a very clean interface to dealing with UTF-8. Every programming language deals with it differently. My brain still explodes when I have to deal with it in python, for instance, even though people say "it is easy". Try reading multiple files in ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, and MacRoman. Try to combine them, and then write to disk again. Code becomes messy when you try to deal with it. I still haven't found a clean way to do it properly.

[rowdy]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

I tried switching from various vi clones (including Vim) to various versions of emacs several times, but always came back to vi.

emacs was too clunky, commands too awkward, far too steep learning curve.  I can't remember how I learned vi, but I seem to recall always liking simple editors like that.

[iLLucionist]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

I tried switching from various vi clones (including Vim) to various versions of emacs several times, but always came back to vi.

emacs was too clunky, commands too awkward, far too steep learning curve.  I can't remember how I learned vi, but I seem to recall always liking simple editors like that.

Yeah, I have the same experience. But then, in the beginning with vim I was like "where is the just type stuff in mode gone? why doesn't text appear?" So I would be up to a period of not knowing what to do until I do. But so far, I couldn't get past that point.

[rowdy]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

I tried switching from various vi clones (including Vim) to various versions of emacs several times, but always came back to vi.

emacs was too clunky, commands too awkward, far too steep learning curve.  I can't remember how I learned vi, but I seem to recall always liking simple editors like that.

Yeah, I have the same experience. But then, in the beginning with vim I was like "where is the just type stuff in mode gone? why doesn't text appear?" So I would be up to a period of not knowing what to do until I do. But so far, I couldn't get past that point.

I've used a lot of odd editors over the years, including TDP, sol and ne.

sol had a feature where you could type a double-quote (iirc) and it would copy the character on the line above the cursor into the current line.  Hours (well, many minutes) were spent in idle contemplation with the " key presed down copying character after character, line after line.

I have not found another editor with the same command ...

... until today, where I accidentally pressed some keys in Eclipse and it copied the current line, which is close enough.

Turns out it was Option-Command-down arrow (on Mac).

Spent a good few minutes copying lines and giggline

[iLLucionist]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

I tried switching from various vi clones (including Vim) to various versions of emacs several times, but always came back to vi.

emacs was too clunky, commands too awkward, far too steep learning curve.  I can't remember how I learned vi, but I seem to recall always liking simple editors like that.

Yeah, I have the same experience. But then, in the beginning with vim I was like "where is the just type stuff in mode gone? why doesn't text appear?" So I would be up to a period of not knowing what to do until I do. But so far, I couldn't get past that point.

I've used a lot of odd editors over the years, including TDP, sol and ne.

sol had a feature where you could type a double-quote (iirc) and it would copy the character on the line above the cursor into the current line.  Hours (well, many minutes) were spent in idle contemplation with the " key presed down copying character after character, line after line.

I have not found another editor with the same command ...

... until today, where I accidentally pressed some keys in Eclipse and it copied the current line, which is close enough.

Turns out it was Option-Command-down arrow (on Mac).

Spent a good few minutes copying lines and giggline

I guess you could do that in vim or emacs. Get cursor position, get character at that line from line above, and paste character on current line.

But really.. what is the purpose of literally copying one character? It is an interesting feature... I've never heard such a thing.

[ErgoMacros]

I'd assume you hold down the "copy key" and it would repeat parts of the above line until you released it.

Selective copy from previous line. (I've never seen it either.)

[rowdy]

Emacs user here for nearly 17 years now, Spacemacs user for about a year and a half. I'm an Emacs user, because it is the most powerful, most customisable thing, ever. It's not just a text editor, it is an IDE, an IRC client, an Email and RSS feed reader, a music player, and whatever else you can imagine. I live inside Emacs. The only thing I do outside of it, is browsing.

This way, I have all the familiar key bindings, and the full power of Emacs at my fingertips, no matter what I do. It is consistent, powerful, and doesn't care that I have thousands of buffers open. Being able to reach everything, from anywhere, pretty much effortlessly, is an incredible boost to both productivity, and comfort.

Honest question. I type vim commands in my sleep, been using it for 15 years. But I am looking toward switching to emacs because of consistency in everything and the increased power. What are the benefits in your opinion? But more importantly. How Do I Switch From Vim. I tried reading emacs manual, tried to "simulate" vim as much as possible. Or am I doing it wrong?

I tried switching from various vi clones (including Vim) to various versions of emacs several times, but always came back to vi.

emacs was too clunky, commands too awkward, far too steep learning curve.  I can't remember how I learned vi, but I seem to recall always liking simple editors like that.

Yeah, I have the same experience. But then, in the beginning with vim I was like "where is the just type stuff in mode gone? why doesn't text appear?" So I would be up to a period of not knowing what to do until I do. But so far, I couldn't get past that point.

I've used a lot of odd editors over the years, including TDP, sol and ne.

sol had a feature where you could type a double-quote (iirc) and it would copy the character on the line above the cursor into the current line.  Hours (well, many minutes) were spent in idle contemplation with the " key presed down copying character after character, line after line.

I have not found another editor with the same command ...

... until today, where I accidentally pressed some keys in Eclipse and it copied the current line, which is close enough.

Turns out it was Option-Command-down arrow (on Mac).

Spent a good few minutes copying lines and giggline

I guess you could do that in vim or emacs. Get cursor position, get character at that line from line above, and paste character on current line.

But really.. what is the purpose of literally copying one character? It is an interesting feature... I've never heard such a thing.

Not copy/paste - that requires two operations and moving the cursor around between.  This is just one keypress (well, a combination of 3 keys pressed at the same time).

I did it again today twice, but deliberately this time.

Strange how useful that is.

[Prothrin]

Sublime Text for sure. VS Code, Atom, and Brackets are also good alternatives.

[TacticalCoder]

Did you guys (at least for those who know how to type without looking at the keyboard, which I take is all of you but here it's a requirement: you cannot use that feature without touch-typing) ever seen vim's "easy motion" or emacs' "ace-jump-mode" or "avy" in action?

What if I tell you it's the biggest single efficiency boost you'll ever get for "moving the cursor around" and "jumping to a character visually on screen"?

You can basically jump to any visible character on screen in "shortcut + 2 or 3 keypress": shortcut to invoke "easy motion" or "ace-jump/avy" (or the equivalent in your editor), keypress the character you want to jump to do, then either one or two keypresses depending on how many times that character appears on screen.

It's the one shortcut I use the most. I use it all the time. Nothing beats that, nothing comes even close to it.

I never ever demo'ed in real-life to someone who then didn't make the switch:

The only thing to remember is "keep you eyes looking at where you want to move the cursor to".  Two minutes explanation/demo from an Emacs guru:

P.S: as it is the most efficient way of moving the cursor around on screen, it was of course invented by some vim user ; )

[iri]

Newest versions of easy-motion require the user to press Leader key twice

[joey]

Fine.. I'll give easymotion a go.

[iLLucionist]

Did you guys (at least for those who know how to type without looking at the keyboard, which I take is all of you but here it's a requirement: you cannot use that feature without touch-typing) ever seen vim's "easy motion" or emacs' "ace-jump-mode" or "avy" in action?

What if I tell you it's the biggest single efficiency boost you'll ever get for "moving the cursor around" and "jumping to a character visually on screen"?

You can basically jump to any visible character on screen in "shortcut + 2 or 3 keypress": shortcut to invoke "easy motion" or "ace-jump/avy" (or the equivalent in your editor), keypress the character you want to jump to do, then either one or two keypresses depending on how many times that character appears on screen.

It's the one shortcut I use the most. I use it all the time. Nothing beats that, nothing comes even close to it.

I never ever demo'ed in real-life to someone who then didn't make the switch:

The only thing to remember is "keep you eyes looking at where you want to move the cursor to".  Two minutes explanation/demo from an Emacs guru:

P.S: as it is the most efficient way of moving the cursor around on screen, it was of course invented by some vim user ; )

I have tried to get used to it, but it doesn't work for me. Because the key you have to press changes everytime, as it uses the letters of next words / paragraphs.

It would be better if there was a plugin that allows you to go down/up 10..50%...70%, with predetermined keys, and then a visual indication where it would bring you, perhaps attached to beginnings of words / sentences / paragraphs / code blocks.

[iri]

Did you guys (at least for those who know how to type without looking at the keyboard, which I take is all of you but here it's a requirement: you cannot use that feature without touch-typing) ever seen vim's "easy motion" or emacs' "ace-jump-mode" or "avy" in action?

What if I tell you it's the biggest single efficiency boost you'll ever get for "moving the cursor around" and "jumping to a character visually on screen"?

You can basically jump to any visible character on screen in "shortcut + 2 or 3 keypress": shortcut to invoke "easy motion" or "ace-jump/avy" (or the equivalent in your editor), keypress the character you want to jump to do, then either one or two keypresses depending on how many times that character appears on screen.

It's the one shortcut I use the most. I use it all the time. Nothing beats that, nothing comes even close to it.

I never ever demo'ed in real-life to someone who then didn't make the switch:

The only thing to remember is "keep you eyes looking at where you want to move the cursor to".  Two minutes explanation/demo from an Emacs guru:

P.S: as it is the most efficient way of moving the cursor around on screen, it was of course invented by some vim user ; )

I have tried to get used to it, but it doesn't work for me. Because the key you have to press changes everytime, as it uses the letters of next words / paragraphs.

It would be better if there was a plugin that allows you to go down/up 10..50%...70%, with predetermined keys, and then a visual indication where it would bring you, perhaps attached to beginnings of words / sentences / paragraphs / code blocks.

H L M

[iLLucionist]

Did you guys (at least for those who know how to type without looking at the keyboard, which I take is all of you but here it's a requirement: you cannot use that feature without touch-typing) ever seen vim's "easy motion" or emacs' "ace-jump-mode" or "avy" in action?

What if I tell you it's the biggest single efficiency boost you'll ever get for "moving the cursor around" and "jumping to a character visually on screen"?

You can basically jump to any visible character on screen in "shortcut + 2 or 3 keypress": shortcut to invoke "easy motion" or "ace-jump/avy" (or the equivalent in your editor), keypress the character you want to jump to do, then either one or two keypresses depending on how many times that character appears on screen.

It's the one shortcut I use the most. I use it all the time. Nothing beats that, nothing comes even close to it.

I never ever demo'ed in real-life to someone who then didn't make the switch:

The only thing to remember is "keep you eyes looking at where you want to move the cursor to".  Two minutes explanation/demo from an Emacs guru:

P.S: as it is the most efficient way of moving the cursor around on screen, it was of course invented by some vim user ; )

I have tried to get used to it, but it doesn't work for me. Because the key you have to press changes everytime, as it uses the letters of next words / paragraphs.

It would be better if there was a plugin that allows you to go down/up 10..50%...70%, with predetermined keys, and then a visual indication where it would bring you, perhaps attached to beginnings of words / sentences / paragraphs / code blocks.

H L M

Wass sagen Sie?

[iri]

Ctrl+d - move down half a page
Ctrl+u - move up half a page
H - Jump to the top of the screen.
M - Jump to the middle of the screen.
L - Jump to the bottom of the screen.

[Findecanor]

I have noticed that page up/page down behaviour differs a lot between text-mode editors, and sometimes between GUI-based editors as well.

On þe olde Amiga, the style guide mandated that the cursor would first jump to the top/bottom of the screen (unless already there) and then scroll a page on a second press -- you have the functionality of H and L in vi but not the same behaviour.
Most GUI-based editors on Windows (and now on Unix/Linux) scroll the window while keeping the cursor position on the same screen position.

Emacs has the weirdest behaviour: if you press Page Down, the window scrolls down and the cursor is moved to the top, but if you then press Page Up, the window scrolls one page up (minus one line) but the cursor is at the bottom: it stayed put on the same line! In other words, page up/down moves the window and the cursor follows instead of the other way around.

[iLLucionist]

Ctrl+d - move down half a page
Ctrl+u - move up half a page
H - Jump to the top of the screen.
M - Jump to the middle of the screen.
L - Jump to the bottom of the screen.

Oh yeah, true.

[iLLucionist]

I have noticed that page up/page down behaviour differs a lot between text-mode editors, and sometimes between GUI-based editors as well.

On þe olde Amiga, the style guide mandated that the cursor would first jump to the top/bottom of the screen (unless already there) and then scroll a page on a second press -- you have the functionality of H and L in vi but not the same behaviour.
Most GUI-based editors on Windows (and now on Unix/Linux) scroll the window while keeping the cursor position on the same screen position.
Emacs has the weirdest behaviour: if you press Page Down, the window scrolls down and the cursor is moved to the top, but if you then press Page Up, the window scrolls one page up but the cursor says put on the same line!

In vim, I configured it so that the cursor will stay put 10 lines before begin/end of the current viewport, so that the next 10 lines are always the last 10 lines, so that I know where I am in the text.

Some editors literally scroll a whole viewport down/above, which is confusing for me.

[Findecanor]

Some editors literally scroll a whole viewport down/above, which is confusing for me.

I'm sorry, I omitted that most editors scroll at least one line less than a whole viewport. Sometimes, the "top of the viewport" is one or more lines down and if you then press up the cursor will not reach the top of the viewport unless it is at the top of the document. But as many as 10 lines is a bit unusual...

There are some rare programs that when you jump a "page" (which is smaller than a full page), draws a line indicating where the viewport's border was before the jump. But the line does not remain - it fades away after a second or two.

[rowdy]

I use BBEdit on Mac now since TextWrangler was discontinued.

BBEdit 12 was recently released, with a default dark theme.

I kinda like dark themes, so this sits well with me.

[JohanAR]

I use vim because I like to keep my hands on the home row. I don't think there's a huge difference in ergonomy or productivity compared to moving one hand between the keyboard and mouse all the time but it feels more relaxing not being forced to. In addition i use i3 with movement remapped to hjkl, VimiumFF for Firefox, Vrapper for Eclipse and zsh with vim bindings so my most used applications are controlled in an (almost) uniform way. I also use less a lot and that also has vim-like controls.

More precisely it's neovim because I read that it was better than regular vim and I use SpaceVim to get lots of nice plugins and stuff without having to dig too deep into that myself

[iLLucionist]

Some editors literally scroll a whole viewport down/above, which is confusing for me.

I'm sorry, I omitted that most editors scroll at least one line less than a whole viewport. Sometimes, the "top of the viewport" is one or more lines down and if you then press up the cursor will not reach the top of the viewport unless it is at the top of the document. But as many as 10 lines is a bit unusual...

There are some rare programs that when you jump a "page" (which is smaller than a full page), draws a line indicating where the viewport's border was before the jump. But the line does not remain - it fades away after a second or two.

Such a line would be great to have in vim. mmm...

[iLLucionist]

I use BBEdit on Mac now since TextWrangler was discontinued.

BBEdit 12 was recently released, with a default dark theme.

I kinda like dark themes, so this sits well with me.

I used bbedit on macos 7/8. Aahh.. the nostalgia.

[iLLucionist]

I use vim because I like to keep my hands on the home row. I don't think there's a huge difference in ergonomy or productivity compared to moving one hand between the keyboard and mouse all the time but it feels more relaxing not being forced to. In addition i use i3 with movement remapped to hjkl, VimiumFF for Firefox, Vrapper for Eclipse and zsh with vim bindings so my most used applications are controlled in an (almost) uniform way. I also use less a lot and that also has vim-like controls.

More precisely it's neovim because I read that it was better than regular vim and I use SpaceVim to get lots of nice plugins and stuff without having to dig too deep into that myself

Neovim is meant as a re-implementation fork of the "standard" implementation of vim by Bram Moolenaar, which the major aims to (1) ensure continuity when Bram gets hit by a bus, (2) get rid of old bloat, like "spaghetti code" to have support for legacy platforms like the Amiga, and (3) to allow concurrent and non-blocking plugins via a new messaging platform.

Neovim is not feature-complete AFAIK, but is getting there rather quickly. There are already some interesting plugins for it.

What I hope that neovim will gain in the future is a proper REPL for things like latex, R, python, and lisp.

EDIT: neovim is a fork, not a re-implementation.

[joey]

neovim is not a re-implementation. It is a fork.

[iLLucionist]

neovim is not a re-implementation. It is a fork.

Oh yeah, I updated it. Thanks. I really thought they started from ground up, but the project also explicitly mentions "major refactoring".

[JohanAR]

Neovim is meant as a re-implementation fork of the "standard" implementation of vim by Bram Moolenaar, which the major aims to (1) ensure continuity when Bram gets hit by a bus, (2) get rid of old bloat, like "spaghetti code" to have support for legacy platforms like the Amiga, and (3) to allow concurrent and non-blocking plugins via a new messaging platform.

Neovim is not feature-complete AFAIK, but is getting there rather quickly. There are already some interesting plugins for it.

What I hope that neovim will gain in the future is a proper REPL for things like latex, R, python, and lisp.

EDIT: neovim is a fork, not a re-implementation.

(2) and (3) is what I read and it sounded like an improvement to me, though I've also heard good things about Vim 8.

[iLLucionist]

Neovim is meant as a re-implementation fork of the "standard" implementation of vim by Bram Moolenaar, which the major aims to (1) ensure continuity when Bram gets hit by a bus, (2) get rid of old bloat, like "spaghetti code" to have support for legacy platforms like the Amiga, and (3) to allow concurrent and non-blocking plugins via a new messaging platform.

Neovim is not feature-complete AFAIK, but is getting there rather quickly. There are already some interesting plugins for it.

What I hope that neovim will gain in the future is a proper REPL for things like latex, R, python, and lisp.

EDIT: neovim is a fork, not a re-implementation.

(2) and (3) is what I read and it sounded like an improvement to me, though I've also heard good things about Vim 8.

I use vim 8, not neovim. I had some plugins break for me occassionally, so unless neovim is 100% parity with "real vim", I am not switching. Too much work to do to tolerate occassional hiccups.

I did play with neovim, and it really feels more responsive and fast. Even though original vim already feels fast, but not when you load it with plugins in my experience.

[TacticalCoder]

I have tried to get used to it, but it doesn't work for me. Because the key you have to press changes everytime, as it uses the letters of next words / paragraphs.

That's how it works and it's because you very probably didn't do it correctly when you tried it:  the trick is to keep your eyes precisely on the letter you want to jump to, say a 't'. Then you invoke ace-jump/avy/easymotion and you hit 't', all the while looking precisely at the 't' you want to go to. Then you immediately type the letter that appears (temporarily) where the 't' was!

[TacticalCoder]

There are some rare programs that when you jump a "page" (which is smaller than a full page), draws a line indicating where the viewport's border was before the jump. But the line does not remain - it fades away after a second or two.

Interesting. The Amiga explanation is great too (oh I miss those Amiga days).

Of course in Emacs everything is configurable so any behavior can be configured. For example there's even a "smooth scrolling" option that scrolls like some old editors used to do (don't remember which one but Sublime scrolls like that): basically like when you scroll up and down in a webpage... Instead of "jumping at once", the thing "scrolls": complete with progressive acceleration and deceleration. And it's not just a fake smooth-scrolling using line by line scrolling: it's moving vertically by "pixels", not whole lines. In Emacs the package is called sublimity and sublimity-scroll.

[iLLucionist]

I have tried to get used to it, but it doesn't work for me. Because the key you have to press changes everytime, as it uses the letters of next words / paragraphs.

That's how it works and it's because you very probably didn't do it correctly when you tried it:  the trick is to keep your eyes precisely on the letter you want to jump to, say a 't'. Then you invoke ace-jump/avy/easymotion and you hit 't', all the while looking precisely at the 't' you want to go to. Then you immediately type the letter that appears (temporarily) where the 't' was!

Hmm.. perhaps that would work better.