Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "I tried 10 code editors" video.

  1. 0:52 I used punched cards in a University summer job. The keypunch was a think an IBM 129 unit -- it actually had a memory for storing the contents of a card. You keyed it all in (you couldn’t actually see the characters you were keying, just a column count), then pressed the Punch key to actually punch the card, and if there was a mistake, you just advanced to the column where the error was, fixed that, and punched a new card from the updated memory.
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  2. Emacs doesn’t just have a GUI, it also provides a GUI toolkit you can access from Elisp code. Think of how the menus, status line, windowing etc are implemented -- yup, all in Elisp.
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  3. You don’t have to “configure” Emacs to start using it. I just started gradually accumulating custom settings over the years I’ve been using it.
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  4. 2:30 No, Emacs is not an IDE. An IDE wants you to group your files into a “project” and use a particular build system for building that project. Emacs doesn’t impose any such restrictions. It can work with any build system and any project organization (or lack of organization) you like.
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  5. Emacs isn’t just a text editor, it is an editor . I have successfully used it to patch binary files.
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  6.  @percivalpenncoloring  Input delay?? I’m a fast typist, and I have noticed no such thing on any Linux or Unix boxes where I have used it. Are you running it on Windows, by any chance?
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  7. That means having to use Windows, though.
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  8. Yeah, particularly when Copilot can create your bugs for you!
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  9. You couldn’t use VScode to edit binary files, though.
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  10. Emacs didn’t get GUI support until it had already been around for about 20 years. That was in the 1990s.
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  11. I must remember that. The next time I need to do such a thing, I need to resist the temptation to do it with “grep -v” (which can operate on arbitrary-sized files) and use vim instead.
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  12. Did the Emacs you write have a LISP core? Emacs without Elisp seems ... incomplete.
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  13.  @BobFrTube  I had fun with TECO, back in the day. That’s where Emacs gets the odd choice of CTRL/G for cancelling input. Did your LISP have lexical binding and token-based macros? It’s not really LISP otherwise. ;)
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  14.  @arinahomuleba4165  I have done, successfully, with Emacs.
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  15. In the same way that VBA is the best programming language!
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  16. Emacs can do that. (Which is in fact the usual answer whenever anybody asks “Why can’t my editor do that?”)
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  17. Emacs was originally implemented in TECO, which goes back to the 1960s. TECO used basically every ASCII character to mean something, so a TECO script was sometimes described as looking like “transmission line noise”. Fun game: enter your name to a TECO interpreter, and try to guess what it will do as TECO commands. Later Emacs was rewritten using its own custom LISP implementation (I think Stallman had a hand in this). But there are still one or two odd traces of its TECO heritage. For example, the keystroke to cancel a macro definition or other keyboard input is CTRL/G. No other software on Earth used that keystroke for that purpose, apart from TECO.
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  18. Including instil feelings of inadequacy in the Emacs-envious.
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  19. Nevertheless, an IDE still has the “project” concept, and you have to go out of your way not to use it. Emacs doesn’t have that concept at all.
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  20. Because only VBA or PHP programmers would think it worth including.
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  21. Some of us run multitasking workstation OSes, which means we do multiple things at once. The idea of devoting the entire computer to doing just one thing seems so ... quaint.
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  22. Anybody tried Jupyter? Now there is an integrated terminal.
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