Lex Fridman: Emacs vs Vim vs VSCode

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Coffeezilla is a journalist and investigator on YouTube who exposes financial frauds, scams, and fake gurus.

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[LexClips]

Guest bio: Coffeezilla is a journalist and investigator on YouTube who exposes financial frauds, scams, and fake gurus.

[hermantcherdakli]

It doesn't matter what editor you use. They are all great (as long as they support vim keybindings)

[jonnyso]

Dude, when VSCode dies Vim and Emacs will still be around. They'll only die when something modern manages to do what they do better then them while beeing a lot more convenient.

[mrmaniac]

This video is like finding out your two favorite NBA players are also rocket scientist

[Olodus]

I am taking to heart what Carmack said in his interview with Lex, where he said that you shouldn't be locked down to only doing your job in a terminal and a TUI-text editor. That we should use other tools that can help us see the problems better from other views.

It is just that I usually work on other machines than my own, usually ssh in, and then its sometimes a hassle to get visual GUI things set up. But I usually have to set those things up anyway when I inevitable have to look at some pcap of some interaction or something like that - so I guess I am mostly being lazy. But yeah, being on weird servers with weird things present on the system is why I lot of the time has been leaning towards TUI stuff and vim tools. But I wholeheartedly agree that it is weird to take vim as anything other than a preference and a good tool. You shouldn't "only use vim" as some kind of dogma. There are lots of things that are not shown best in text and we should try to expand and use the best tools for the jobs.

[hinkr]

"Just when I thought I was out, the Emacs chruch pulled me back in..." Lex Fridman

[srijan]

Just use a vim plugin in whatever ide you are using. Get the vim keybindings for the text editing qnd use whatever feature the ide provides.

[Patrk]

I use vim, because I use terminal every day and its useful to be comfortable with the tool that's available on every system I SSH to.

[exstasis]

"How long will Vim and Emacs be around really?"
Longer than VS Code will be. Text editors have come and gone dozens of times since Vim and Emacs have been around, yet they still have active communities. Who's to say that the currently active community around VS Code don't just jump ship onto the next best editor in 5 years?

[just_niv]

i think emacs will not die out any time soon, its been active for decades

[byoung]

Been a jetbrains user for years, and have only recently been experimenting with the vim plugin for key binds/ vim movements. I can already see the potential for a beautiful relationship as hard as the learning curve and initial mental overhead has been. Whatever your choice, I'll still love you Lex!!

[Skylla]

Lex, make a 10hour lesson of "how a editor should be?"!
I am totally in for it!

[jrmoulton]

As a young person just starting my career vim/Neovim really seems to be the way forward. Extremely powerful customization and it almost always just works (after some initial effort). But yeah always watching from the shadows...

[almostatistic]

Lex come back.
We have Doom Emacs now! Please.

[danieldoherty]

The thing about Emacs is that its an all-purpose text-manipulation machine: programming, sure, but also documents (auctex), emails, notes (org), calendar (org), calculator (calc), and that's just the highlights. It is a bottomless well of functionality. I used vim for many years and still have vim fingers: it's a great key-binding design. But if you aspire to do more than manipulate program text, look beyond vim and the IDE's to Emacs.

[russianvideovlogguy]

vim is not an ide until you make it into an ide? is this correct ? I'd imagine to say it's better is subjective based on how vim was setup. if you are just using vim as a text editor then it's not justified as a basis of comparison to an ide when it is inherently just a text editor. I never understood why people setup vim to be vs code clones - at that point just use vs code because it's pretty incredible stock.

[alexanderkhutsishvili]

How cofeezilla is related to emacs or engineering?

[Martin-lcsk]

I love Emacs, it's a basic ide with hidden depths.

It doesn't write your code for you, you have to learn properly.

[cheetah]

The problem is that not only is there constant change and new technology, but that the rate of change is increasing.

[baerit]

Emacs has been around for about 40 years or so, it's not going anywhere. It may never be as popular as other text editors, but there will always be people using it.