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0 pointscoliveira5y ago0 comments

> is the acme of what C and Unix can do

No way, acme is just ONE direction for Unix and C. Vi is another direction, as well as a ton of other editors that were made for Unix and C.

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zeveb5y ago· 2 in thread

I was making a pun: 'acme' means the highest point.

But I also disagree with you: acme is strictly more powerful than vi, and vim is just a Greenspunned Emacs. Greenspun's Tenth Rule holds that 'any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp'; I contend that vim is an ad-hoc, informally-specified[0], bad-taste (seriously, have you ever looked at Vimscript?) reimplementation of Emacs's functionality.

It does, however, have better keybindings than Emacs does by default.

0: outside of the POSIX stuff it gets from vi, that is

coliveiraOP5y ago

Emacs is built on Unix like vi and everything else. The fact that vi has a less elegant language doesn't affect me, because I don't see much value in adding extensions to the editor. What I need is a sane user interface, which vim provides.

abjKT26nO85y ago

The original Emacs was written for Multics at a time when people outside of Bell Labs were largely unaware of the existence of Unix[1]. It also doesn't follow the Unix philosophy of making small CLI utilities composed with pipes. As I understand it (though I haven't used it), Acme is extended with external programs which communicate through pipes just like the traditional Unix utilities.

[1]: https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html

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