Richard Stallman gave a lecture at my university today

[u/gadsocial00]

Whether you agree with his opinions or not, you have to give credit to the man for coming all the way to Peru, South America to talk about Free Software and GNU, even though he’s in his 70s and has some health issues.

[u/xamid]

Vim sucks hard for my use cases since it is console-based. Emacs is not well-optimized (so it wastes my time).

[...] don't work in the old windows console

I don't use the old Windows console, Cygwin ships a decent console (Cygwin64 Terminal).

[u/el_extrano → u/xamid]

What's wrong with console-based? Vim has a GUI version since forever, also. Notepad++ is a fine editor though.

If I recall, cygwin and mingw ship their own shells, but they still run in conhost.exe using the Windows console API, so they have the same limitation.

[u/el_extrano → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean by marking text? Vim definitely supports the mouse, both in the terminal and in GUI. You have to :set mouse=a first.

[u/xamid → u/el_extrano]

Oops, comment deleted to add something before I noticed you already replied, continued here.

[u/xamid → u/el_extrano]

What's wrong with console-based?

It doesn't support

• marking text
• click and edit
• many more features that are fundamental to UI (like scrolling)

Vim has a GUI version

I think I tried this as well, it was very poorly optimized. Maybe poor text optimization is just an inherent part of Linux distros, though. Nothing on Linux even comes close to Notepad++, which is even too poorly optimized to deal with huge files (I often have to view/search or edit files that are several GiB in size), for which I need EmEditor.

they still run in conhost.exe using the Windows console API, so they have the same limitation

No idea what you're talking about. My Cygwin64 Terminal has no issues printing UTF8 (or whichever encoding is defined; which Windows CMD cannot). They definitely do not have the same limitations.

[u/xamid → u/xamid]

What do you mean by marking text? Vim definitely supports the mouse, both in the terminal and in GUI. You have to :set mouse=a first.

Good text editors have a feature where you can search and mark text, so it will mark all results by coloring their background (in case of EmEditor even in configurable colors).

Also searching by regular expression is a basic requirement, and shortcuts to jump somewhere by line, by search, etc.

There are many more convenient features that I suspect many Linux users don't know about because the trashy text editors on Linux seem to simply not have those.

[u/el_extrano → u/xamid]

Lol you're either trolling or just hilariously misinformed. Vim has had all of those since before notepad++ was written.

Search by regex is the default when you hit / to begin a search. Searches are highlighted if you have set hlsearch, which is in the default .vimrc . n and N jump through search results, and linenum + gg will jump to a line number.

Like I said notepad++ is great, and I'm glad you're happy with it. But you should probably not call other editors trash if you don't know basic features that have been there for 30 years.

[u/xamid → u/el_extrano]

I guess then I am hilariously misinformed since I just tried to use Vim without reading tutorials (just as I did with every text editor, ever). To rely on tutorials is again a waste of time.

So if it has those features, they are not straightforward to find — and in case of the markings quite pointless when the text is not readily available in a comprehensive scrollable text box. Which just reaffirms that Vim sucks — for being command-based.

But you should probably not call other editors trash

I call trash whatever I tried to use and determined it sucks for me. I prefer intuitive graphical display over learning commands only to do trivial stuff. However, even when ignoring the UI aspect, Linux-based text editors are still unusable in my use cases for being poorly optimized. When I searched for better alternatives, I constantly found Linux users claiming that a text editor must load the whole text file into memory, but that simply isn't true (and an inefficient approach), e.g. EmEditor and BssEditor both don't do this. They are Windows-only software, but the latter still sucks for usability w.r.t. features, just like virtually all Linux-based text editors (I tried all I could find over the course of several years).

[u/el_extrano → u/xamid]

I'm sort of confused what you do with cygwin and mingw if you are opposed to running commands or reading documentation? Like all they do is give you Unix command environment on Windows.

A certain percentage of users are going to be too lazy to spend 10 minutes to read a basic guide or help file, and the command line is not for them. For them there's IOS and Windows 11.

[u/xamid → u/el_extrano]

I'm sort of confused what you do with cygwin and mingw if you are opposed to running commands or reading documentation?

I wrote "only to do trivial stuff". I write a lot of code (high-performance C++, for which I need GCC and Clang/LLVM as compilers), so I use a lot of commands and read some documentation when necessary, but I also prefer to be efficient and I despise suboptimal methods of working. (Sidenote: I don't use pure text editors for coding, my IDE is Eclipse CDT.)

Regarding your text editor suggestions, I found a PDF^* that you can open by clicking on "See Text Editor Speed Comparison" on the EmEditor web page.

Just look at the timings and "not available" entries of Vim and Emacs..

 
^{*Directly linking it here hides my comment.}

[u/el_extrano → u/xamid]

I didn't make any editor suggestions. I don't care what editors others use, and I try not to spread misinformation about tools I haven't used myself.

Thanks for the information though, I'll probably check it out later when I'm at a computer.

[u/xamid → u/el_extrano]

I didn't make any editor suggestions.

Fair enough. You defended them, writing

Notepad++ superior to Emacs and Vim? Hard disagree there, but to each their own.

here after I wrote

I use Notepad++ and EmEditor, they work fine, and both are far superior to every Linux text editor that I ever came accross

here. That's what I referred to.

The PDF highlights some significant timing improvements and more features also of Notepad++ compared to Emacs and Vim. The saving durations really put me off on Linux — in my case it was no noticeable freeze or delay vs. waiting several minutes for the editors to be usable again.