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I guess, given how evil-mode just gets better and better every day I'm not really seeing many people moving in the other direction, at least based on the blog posts.

No shade on Vim, people like it and are productive in it. I see it like using Sublime Text, lots of people can get away with it, but I need more doodads in my editor.

And hey, nobody is like "Notepad++ vs. Visual Studio", which I think kinda matches the mismatch (or maybe "Notepad++ vs Atom" or something)




Here's the thing, though. I don't use Vim as an IDE. I use it on live servers to change configs / scripts / app code (don't tell anyone) quickly and efficiently. I don't think "extra doodads" would help with that, and I'm not sure I'd want to manage those dependencies on my platform anyway.

If I'm actually developing something that's part of a greater whole, then I'm using a fully fledged IDE like PyCharm (but with the VIM emulator plugged in for when I need it, of course ;-D).

Likewise, no shade at Emacs, though. Several of my favorite colleagues use it!


Contrary to what many might expect, Emacs tools are quite good for performing sysadmin tasks:

* TRAMP for remote editing. It's more powerful than Vim's netrw remote editing capabilites and can handle root-owned files on remote servers. It's so extensible there's even a package that allows you to edit files inside Docker containers running on remote servers.

* Dired. It's the best text-based file manager out there IMHO, and it integrates very nicely with TRAMP.

* Org mode. It can be used like Jupyter notebook, but is far more powerful. You can write each code block in any language you choose, pass data between them, and make each of them run on different servers. This is very useful for sysadmin tasks especially in professional environments because it allows you to document each step in a reproducible manner as you're executing it. You can then just share the org document for your cowokers to review.

I personally use Vim for coding and Emacs for non-trivial sysadmin tasks.


Changes to PRODUCTION app code on server?! I’ve seen this happen once or twice at my current company. Not the best of times...


Everyone has a test environment. Some are lucky enough to have a separate production environment.




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