Emacs 24.4 RC 1 (opens in new tab)

What's the advantage of Helm to Ido?

> I've seen that people accustomed to one editor are usually averse to using the other.

I think this is more a meme than necessarily a reality - you'll tend to see a lot more comments online from people who think the old joke is funny or who want to validate their own choice than from people who don't care or have tried both without such strong feelings.

In reality, there's really no barrier to 'manage' to use both emacs and vim. If anything, since they're both powerful and configurable programs whose best configuration is personal and some way from the default, it probably is harder to construct your own perfect config in both than for simpler alternatives like web browsers - I guess this may lead to a practical aversion.

Personally, I think vim's modal editing is superb but generally prefer the behaviour of emacs' modes and client model, so I use emacs with evil-mode but have no problem using vim if necessary.

Hehe because I don't subscribe to monotheism? ;) I prefer vim's modal editing mode and have been using it as my primary for as long as I can remember. For clojure/lisp, I found that the vim tooling was just not as elegant/efficient as emacs (fireside et al arent as nice as cider/swank), and decided to learn how to use it. It's not that much of an "antipattern" because the keymaps are very different. I don't like using vim mode within emacs either - for some reason I find myself thinking in emacs mode when editing lisps. I do think that I could be more productive in emacs if I invested more time in the tutorials, but so far it hasn't been an issue. To me, it's more like needing to know how to use Eclipse or IntelliJ to program in Java since their tooling is so great.

Not really. There are lots of people who get off on imaginary rivalries and enjoy exaggerating the virtues of what they like and the flaws of what they don't like. Some of the more self-aware people know what they're doing and consider it all in good fun, but the dumb ones just go along with it because they actively enjoy engaging in tribalism.

See also casual sports fans who don't understand the game they watch, but understand and enjoy pretending to love one team unconditionally for no particular reason, and hating another team for no reason other than it's fun for them to hate somebody. Ditto for operating system fanboys of all stripes.

I typically use Vim for quick edits on my Mac, and especially on remote boxes.

But for Haskell and Clojure development, it's hard to beat the tight integration features that Emacs provides (e.g. quickly piping your code or a single function to the REPL for testing). Vim is not designed for this; there are plugins available to approximate it, but it’s a bit hacky and nowhere close to Emacs).

Honestly, it's not hard to learn the basics of both. If you're accustomed to Vim commands, Emacs has `evil-mode`. There's also the slick `god-mode`, which is like Vim's Normal mode for Emacs.

Both tools are great in their own ways. Personally, I regularly use and love them both.

Personally, I started out using Emacs because I wasn't a big fan of the "modal" style of vi (insert/command mode). Later on, I started pair programming in shared GNU Screen sessions, in which we ran vim; a pile of "how did you make that change so quickly" questions later, and I ended up switching to vim for the speed of basic text editing tasks, which save more time than I lose by not having as many high-level mode-specific commands.

However, I still use Emacs for LaTeX documents via AUCTeX, because I find it far more powerful for basic editing, with commands to insert directives, environments, \item, etc.

If you are a Unix user, you almost need to know enough vi to edit a simple file. crontab -e is considered a minor sin in the Church of Emacs, but only a minor one.

ESC:q!

I used both back in college. I usually used XEmacs for coding and reading mail/usenet and vi for sysadmin stuff. These days I've moved on to IDEs for coding and only break out emacs for editing binaries or large files.

It worked out pretty well as long as I used Emacs in an X window and vi on the command line. But if I ran emacs in a terminal, I automatically started typing vi commands into it.

I use Evil for that: Vim-style editing in Emacs, best of both worlds.

Right - but the fact that they behave more like a window manager menu than ever before - as in, they drop down et al.

Slime is really amazing. It provides tons of features of which here are a few (these work with Common Lisp, I have no clue if they work with Clojure).

Inspector[0]: You can click on objects to "inspect" their values. This includes hash-tables, arrays, and closures. In addition you can execute arbitrary code on these objects at any time, even while a program is running.

Trace Dialog[1]: Most Lisp implementations already provide a way to trace procedures. Tracing normally consists of printing the input and the output as each traced procedure is called. Slime provides something much more powerful. Slime's Trace Dialog is similar to trace in that it creates a buffer of the input and output, but instead it is provided in a tree menu format. In addition it is possible to inspect all of the values in the Trace Dialog with the inspector.

Debugger[2]: When an error is thrown in a program, a window pops up which provides several things. You can click on a stack frame to see all of the variables in that frame and then inspect those variables with the inspector. You are also provided with a list of restarts[3]. In addition, you can return a value from a given stack frame, or retry a procedure call on the stack frame (you may have modified the definitions of some procedures before you did this), and have the program continue as if nothing had ever happened.

There are also many other features, such as the ability to macroexpand code by clicking on it, to look up every procedure which calls a given procedure, to look up every place in which a given variable is set, and many other awesome features.

[0] http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Inspector.html

[1] http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/SLIME-Trace-Di...

[2] http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Debugger.html#...

[3] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Common_Lisp/Advanced_topics/Con...

I can speak about Clojure support for Emacs a bit, but I don't know how much of this Sublime or Atom can do.

I like the cider+nrepl workflow myself. You can edit your code, reevaluate it, and test it without having to restart your JVM. As you can imagine, this really speeds up development.

Also, though I haven't quite grokked all the barfing and slurping yet, paredit has really become a huge part of my code writing and editing in Emacs for Clojure code. I am on the cusp of getting barfing and slurping working for me now ;)

There's quite a lot of technology that allows you to write lisp/clojure very well in emacs. Some that come to mind,

- Swank/Slime (Lisp inferior modes) that allow you to write lisp, evaluate within the editor, see your results in a buffer. Offer auto complete, refactoring, debugging et al.

The more recent nrepl and cider modes for Clojure build on top of slime/swank and offer extremely great tools to write code as well. If you ever wanted to have the REPL running on the side and have great interop between code in a file and the REPL - these modes are great. Imagine their power when you can connect into a running webserver and debug on the fly from within your editor.

- A lot of original emacs plugins like paredit have now been ported to other platforms like Sublime. Also, emacs itself is written in lisp, which makes it a first class language it supports at its very core.

Aside from all the other reasons other people already listed, there is a one fundamental benefit. Emacs is not just an editor, it's a Lisp runtime with text-editing functionality bolted on top. Lisp is natural for Emacs at all levels of complexity - from the fact that it's easy to work with Lisp code using Lisp to the Emacs community, composed in a big part of Lispers. Lisp just fits Emacs.

Emacs is pretty much a built in REPL primarily written in Lisp.

Slime

Elisp is not Scheme and certainly is not Haskell. You shouldn't - and I'd say it a good general rule - judge Elisp based on what it's not instead of what it is.

Getting back to actual question: Elisp supports "real" lexical scoping since previous major Emacs version, and it has had "lexical-let" and other such forms since forever, but most of the code is still dynamically scoped. In practical terms it's similar to having every variable declared as global - it allows for "out of band" communication (outside of arguments passed/value returned) between routines. This is sometimes handy if you want to change some function behaviour in a way that it didn't think of (ie. it has no argument dedicated for this). As a very contrived example, if you have a routine which beeps furiously every time you invoke it and you find it unbearable (I did) you can instead call it like this:

    (letf
        (((symbol-function 'beep) (lambda ())))
      (beeping-function))

And it won't beep any more. A real life saver sometimes ;)

On the other hand, every out-of-band communication has a set of problems to it: you can forget to check it, or you can accidentally pass something to a called function you didn't want to. In practice this is worked around with using longer, prefixed identifiers and the semantics of `let`. As long as every variable your function uses is let-bound inside it it is essentially safe to call with any kind of environment, as it won't ever look at it. Most functions are like that.

In short, dynamic scoping has it's advantages and drawbacks, and it feels quite well suited to an extension/scripting language of an app. It makes certain patterns easy enough that they don't even need a name ("monkey patching"), and it makes others much harder (like the linked dash-functional library, which would be very hard to write without lexical-scoping: t).

I did not know about Homebrew's Cocoa Emacs. Thanks for the tip. I'm installing it now and will see if I get 24.4 with eww or some previous version (minus the eww). Thanks again!

My feeling is that it's much better than aquamacs. Aquamacs does some things enough differently to regular emacs that I just fine working with homebrew emacs (or emacsforosx) less effort when installing new packages.