Bad bad vim

New post after so long of inactivity. And negatively oriented, toward bashing my favorite editor: vim.

I'm not sure why people are calling emacs a kitchen sink of editors when vim is on a good path to became, even a bigger one.

From time to time I fire up emacs (recently a little bit more often than before after I discovered Evil, vim uber emulation mode for emacs, making emacs usable to us, poor vi/vim users) to see what progress is made in editor world and how vim is keeping up with it.

Sometimes I am happy why I'm still using vim (speed, integrated spell check) and sometimes I'm jealous for some features vim probably will never have (external processes inside editor, dbus support, extension language) or are implemented badly (syntax coloring, extension language, own spell check instead already existing, like aspell, ispell or else).


Well, see, for emacs we have Babel and I'm very happy with it. Install emacs and install Babel and things works.

Vim has also nice one, called VimTranslator, except it supports only Google Translate. This is not an issue, except you have to have installed ruby to use it.

No matter I'm not using ruby at all, to use full vim version I must install ruby. Probably because to write vim extensions you can use 10 different languages, forcing your users to install them and everything those languages requires. Yuck!

Emacs is not perfect either, but to extend it I need to learn single language (elisp) and I can be productive. For vim, I can choose between half baked junk called vimscript or something better in form of heavyweight alternatives like python, perl, ruby... What to expect in the future; java maybe?