What are the efficiencies afforded by Emacs or Vim vs Eclipse?
I started coding around 5 years ago. I was introduced through Java and Eclipse which both have substantial stigma attached in the programming community. A number of people at the company I currently intern at prefer emacs or vim. I can't see how a basic text editor is faster or easier than an IDE in general although I appreciate some things like building tend to be faster from the command line.
Is this a case of the 'old-boys' club or can it be more efficient to program a project in this way?
Can you provide some use cases to demonstrate? If I were advocating Eclipse I'd say refactoring and auto-completion were pretty handy tools.
Gav
Answer
Vim / Emacs
- Very fast/efficient code writing
- Low memory footprint
- Quick access to command line
- Infinite possibilities through scripting/plugins
- Never have to leave the keyboard
Eclipse
- Full-featured IDE for many languages
- Great refactoring support
All of them
- Cross-platform
- Feature rich
- Extensible through plugins
I typically find myself writing volumes of code through vim and performing debugging tasks through my IDE. Familiarity with the code base is certainly a factor, as an IDE is a great tool for jumping around and learning unfamiliar source code.