Listen, I will not drink the koolaid. I will not take the blue pill. I have
lived on both sides of this fence, and I know what BS smells like.
I have not had to hack on my Linux boxen in years. They just work. If OS X
works for you, great, but don’t drag Linux’s name through the mud just
because you’re an Apple fanboy.
Maybe I am one. My experience with Linux started some 6 years ago and I
still
work with it daily. My experience with MS OSes goes back to DOS5.x
My experience with OS X is a bit more than a year. So I can compare, and
I know what I prefere.
But like you’ve said - to each his own.
Sheesh, people, let’s get back to the much less controversial vim vs. emacs
vs. textmate discussion.
Well… I just honestly thought some of your other comments were plain
wrong. I reccomend to you that next time if you don’t want to start a
discussion about mac vs. Linux, then don’t start it. Remember that you
started by making claims that MacOs was years behind Linux and that
Apple was overpriced and a few more comments. You say that only few
sentences after claiming that you DON’T want the discussion to revolve
around those things.
If you don’t want a holy war. Don’t bomb the church.
Ya, Jake, you crapped on my Mac-heart and then told us you didn’t want
to get into that topic!
When debating an editor know this… TextMate, Vi/Vim, Emacs are all
extremely powerful. All three have features the others don’t. It’s
not really a matter of having the best editor but a matter of you
knowing which ever editor you choose intimately.
Too often we are quick to jump from one editor to another. All three
of the above, if truly learned, are fantastic editors. If all you
know is how to move around, insert, delete lines then all three of
them suck big time. It’s all about your knowledge of the editor.
Stick with one and learn it inside and out. That’s the best thing you
can ever do if your a programmer. Devote a serious amount of time
learning your editor. I’d never claim to be a carpenter if I’ve only
ever used a jig saw to cut a straight line. The editor is the/a tool
of the trade. Learn it well and don’t jump ship easily.
… Now, mac os x as training wheels? I don’t think you spent any
time with it if that’s how you feel. I do advanced things in Mac OS X
that Linux can only dream of, but that’s another topic… don’t care
to start an OS war, but before giving opinions, please try to know
what your talking about first. Yes, I have used Linux for almost 10
years now and do so on a continuous basis but would never trade my OS
X box for a Linux box. Oh, also, I have one kick butt os x laptop for
$1,299 … best deal around in regards to laptops, nothing expensive
about it, quality for quality.
Is $599 overpriced??? You can do EVERYTHING in MacOs you can do in
Linux.
I have a couple of friends who have Macs, and I marvel at the frequency
with which they are raped for $100+ upgrades. Apple sells you a base
system and then keeps leeching more money, but I suppose that’s not
difficult to orchestrate when the majority of your user base is
technicaly illiterate and thus very afraid of disobeying the Holy
Upgrade Commandments emanating from Cupertino.
The Mac is okay – nice looking apps and a proper Unix shell, but there
is no way I’d pay through the nose and downgrade from Debian or FreeBSD.
system and then keeps leeching more money, but I suppose that’s not
difficult to orchestrate when the majority of your user base is
technicaly illiterate and thus very afraid of disobeying the Holy
Upgrade Commandments emanating from Cupertino.
The Mac is okay – nice looking apps and a proper Unix shell, but
there
is no way I’d pay through the nose and downgrade from Debian or
FreeBSD.
Wow, what $100+ upgrades are they having to fork out for? My mac has
had a 1GB ram upgrade (£35 off ebay) and that’s been it. I don’t
foresee any further upgrades for this machine.
That said, I’m not sure posts like yours (or mine) are constructive
for a Rails list. So a Mac isn’t suitable for your requirements, it’s
perfectly suitable for my requirements and many others. I would be
completely unproductive on a Linux based machine. It’s horses for
courses, I don’t think this thread needs to continue.
Alastair
Alastair M.
Standards compliant web development with Ruby On Rails, PHP and ASP www.kozmo.co.uk
07738 399038
On Tue Aug 29, 2006 at 01:57:43AM +0200, Stan wrote:
difficult to orchestrate when the majority of your user base is
technicaly illiterate and thus very afraid of disobeying the Holy
Upgrade Commandments emanating from Cupertino.
The Mac is okay – nice looking apps and a proper Unix shell, but there
is no way I’d pay through the nose and downgrade from Debian or FreeBSD.
downgrade? does your kFreeBuntu box have Quartz Extreme II+? can your
debugger ‘rewind’ to an earlier point in app execution? how about that
FCP - did you finally get Cinelerra and JahShaka talking to mencoder via
a clever bash command? let me get this straight. all i ahve to do is
turn it on, and im making podcasts, hit movies, and ironic TV
Commercials? sign me up!
For me, time spent configuring emacs is not wasted time, as this is a
tool I hope to be able to use for years to come, on any OS I may find
myself working on (either by choice or obligation). A well configured
emacs almost hides the OS underneath allowing me to be productive on an
unfamiliar system. Things I like about my emacs setup :
For rails I am happy with Arorem
(http://dev.technomancy.us/phil/wiki/arorem), I like the fact that I can
switch from a controller to the corresponding view or test and back with
a single key stroke.
Shell-mode is great, because I can cut and paste code from controllers
straight into a running irb or script/console session and back .
With tramp-mode you can edit files directly on a remote server from
within your desktop emacs session.
Speedbar-mode will give you something like textmate’s hierarchical
menus.
Info mode for browsing documentation (It’d be nice if RDoc could export
in Info format!).
The ability to write little functions to save time, either in elisp or
calling a ruby script with some parameters and sending the output to a
buffer . I have a simple function for looking up my ma.gnolia bookmarks
from withing emacs. How about google searching a piece of rails code
from within emacs ?
It’d be nice to hear about / see other emacs users’ configurations for
working with ruby/rails code.
Mac overpriced? Are you still in 1996? Do a comparison sometime, and I
wonder if you really have used OS X recently. Hardly a downgrade from
Linux, but if you like to stay in that world, good for you…hope its
not too lonely in there.
Jake C. wrote:
Guys,
In terms of the epic saga of vi versus emacs, I’ve always been a vi guy.
However, I’ve never taken my vi knowledge to the advanced level…I know
how
to get around and be dangerous and know some things, but mostly I have
around 20-30 key strokes available in muscle memory and that’s it.
For most of my coding, I’ve always preferred a more intuitive solution.
I
used UltraEdit for a long time on Windows for Java development, then
switched to Linux and went with JEdit, and finally Eclipse.
I use RadRails now and love it, but it is indeed heavy and I often look
over
at the Textmate crowd and wonder what I’m missing. No way in hell I’ll
ever
buy a Mac to get access to an editor…first, Macs are extremely
overpriced
and Os X is an upgrade from Windows but a downgrade from Linux (yes, I
have
used it. I felt like someone had reinstalled my training wheels without
my
knowledge). You will pry Linux and cheap x86 hardware from my cold dead
fingers thank you very much.
blah blah blah blah blah
So do you think Emacs stands up to Textmate apples for apples? Is there
anything Textmate can do that Emacs can’t?
Thanks,
Jake
By definition? NO. Emacs is fully extensible. I don’t just mean it’s
open source, I mean the entire program is written in a version of lisp.
When you type “e” in a buffer (file, to put it extremely simple for
non-emacs users) you are running lisp command to insert the character
“e” into the buffer. Emacs “modes” change this behavior.
Textmate’s snippets => Emacs has a minor mode snippet.el that can handle
this type of inclusion. For non-dynamic macros the abbrev-minor-mode
already built into emacs can handle it.
Editing text Emacs win’s hands down. Anything it can’t do you can make
it do. You can quickly record a macro of your commands, then save this
macro with a name and keybinding to use later on any time you want.
Emacs can have sidebar type of functionality through “speedbar”
(built-in) or ECB (I prefer this one) which offers many IDE style
windows to emacs. ECB also comes with built-in version control support
(at least for cvs and svn, which is all I use).
Elisp is not too hard to learn and the editor can be whatever you want
it to be. Plus it’s free. Plus it comes for EVERY os you’ll ever use.
Just remember that when people say Emacs is extensible they don’t mean
because it’s open source, they mean you can change how the program
behaves, while it’s running. You can download MILLIONS of elisp files
that add tons of features to emacs. From snippets, to mail readers, to
browsers (editing wiki’s and blogs is much nicer in emacs where you have
all of your other text-editing custimizations), to chess games, to irc
clients.
The problem is it can’t always do these things strait out of the box
until you load up other *.el files. It will not function like Textmate
right away, but it definitely CAN, and definitely can be custimized far
beyond what Textmate ever will be able to do.
