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I love the command line, but I find this to be hair-shirted fetishization of the command-line aesthetic.

If we're to have an advance in programmer's editors, what we really need are more powerful and convenient ways of dealing with our working sets. By working sets, I mean working sets of definitions, methods, classes -- code entities and not files.

Right now, we're fudging this using virtual screens, multiple screens, groupings of windows, working sets in git/Mercurial, tabs, buffers, code folding, etc... The only tool I've seen that deals directly and cleanly with working sets is code bubbles.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3854

That looks nice, if Eclipse is your thing. What about a lightweight tool that's an add-on to vim that deals directly with working sets? What about a Textmate-like editor on OS X with explicit working set support? (This should be integrated with code folding, so that you can quickly delineate a working set, save it, then later restore it, with only the entities in the working set unfolded.)




It's a joke.


It reads like a joke from somebody too young to remember ed. Vi/m minus the insert mode leaves you with ed/ex, and a lot of serious programming has been done with those.


Yeah. Specifically, it's a lame gag in the vi/emacs holy war.


I don't find such interesting. Please look at the LtU post and consider what I said about working sets.


1) I've already seen it.

2) You might look into making comments that have better relevance to the posts and comments you're replying to. Doubly so if you don't find them interesting.


The post is about editors. It's the joke I don't find interesting.


No, this post is not about 'text editors', it is about 'a joke about text editors'.

Nobody really cares if you don't find it interesting. Flag it, maybe make a comment to that effect, and buzz off. Just don't veer off topic.


If you reflect for a moment, you'll find that both the posted gag and my humorless comments are actually getting at the same underlying idea.


No, it's pretty tangential.


Why are you using the venue of comments on a parody of just that "command-line aesthetic" (well, as much as old-school text editor UIs are "command lines") to ramble on about this topic?

That is what blog posts are for.


If at any time you think to yourself, "Gee, I wish [vim/emacs] could do [foo]", then you should rejoice, for you now know that you have some more learning to do.


Does vim really do working sets, or can you just keep track of working sets by doing [a bunch of geeky stuff]?


If '[doing a bunch of geeky stuff]' is a concept that is off-putting to you, then you really have no business using real editors like vim/emacs/vile.


It's a major piece of functionality. I take it you don't know of any that directly fulfills it.

Smart people might like [a bunch of geeky stuff].

Stupid people are proud to do the same [bunch of geeky stuff] over and over again, and are proud of their "skill" in doing so.

(FYI: I've been using EMACS since 1989)




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