Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "I tried 10 code editors" video.

  1. 2:40 I'd actually argue that Emacs is a modal editor but it modals are not vi-like command mode vs insert mode vs visual mode. The modal states in Emacs is key sequence prefixes. You can consider Emacs as being the insert mode most of the time and entering different command modes with key combinations like Ctrl+H. After you have pressed that combination, the editor is now in "help mode" until you get out of it. Luckily, the default mode is insert mode which seems to match human thinking better than vi-like "command mode is the default mode".
    29
  2. I totally agree! And even if you're the only member of the team, clearly separating the code from the tools allows you to switch tools later if you find a better tool. I mostly write PHP code in RAII style for my daily job (doing that for nearly 20 years already) and I've gone through xedit, kate, jedit, Eclipse PDT, PhpStorm and VS Code. Each has had pros and cons. It appears that the DLTK library that the Eclipse PDT is based on understands complex class hierarchies better than any of the other tools but Eclipse often has performance problems. PhpStorm has somewhat similar experience – it can decipher the code and do some sanity checking automatically and it can find some things that Eclipse cannot find and vice versa. And PhpStorm, running on JVM, too, has its own performance problems, too. VS Code seems like a lot dumber when it comes to how much it understands about the code (this may be actually caused by the PHP Intelephense extension that you practically have to use to make VS Code to understand anything about PHP), but the VS Code has very stable performance: always acceptable but never truly great. The biggest problem I have with VS Code right now is that you cannot have code line level blame active while writing code. And the diff view between workspace and history is read only! And all the Git tools in Eclipse, PhpStorm or VS Code are actually pretty week. I prefer "git gui" and "gitk" any day compared to any of those. The gitk may not have the flashiest graphics but it can easily handle project histories with over 10000 commits unlike most graphical tools. And "git gui blame" has better tools for figuring true history of a given line of code than any other tool. And git gui has superior interface for committing lines instead of files. VS Code makes it really hard to build commits based on specific lines only over multiple files, instead of snapshotting everything in the working directory.
    1
  3.  @Neran280  Eclipse works pretty well with enough command line flags. Something like -nosplash -vmargs -client -Xms400m -Xmx3000m -XX:+UseStringDeduplication -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseZGC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=3 -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseLargePages -XX:ConcGCThreads=2 -XX:ParallelGCThreads=3 -XX:+UseDynamicNumberOfGCThreads -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:+ZProactive -XX:ZAllocationSpikeTolerance=4 -XX:NewSize=64m should result in pretty low latency with latest JVM if you're willing to grant up to 3 GB of RAM to Eclipse.
    1