I'm just going to reply to the bit that I want to ;) [snip] > I'm glad you said this, because it gives me a chance to repeat the > essential statement of my first post: > > To displace Emacs, an editor must offer much *more* than Emacs. > > To say this another way, Robin's post makes no sense if all we want > is: > > a) an Editor and > b) an Editor with all and only Emacs's features! > > Do you see? Nobody in their right mind is going to spend years *just* > duplicating Emacs. Emacs is *already* an open source project.
Over the years (and in particular since Scintilla was made available in various programming languages via wrappers), I've seen a lot of editors spring up with different features, designs, goals, etc. More than a few of them state that one of their goals is to "replace X", where X = Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, and any one of a number of other editors, tools, etc. Every editor has their unique features and designs that gives each one of them an edge in one way or another. But not all of them can replace Emacs ;) . Then again...I'm not sure that it really makes sense to replace Emacs or Vim (WRT major functionalities); the console-centric nature of both of them has invaded even their "GUI" variants, and the various clones suffer (IMO) from the same limitations that the original Emacs and Vim. To really change programming, and really start replacing the "old standards" without cloning them, I think, requires thinking substantially different from what the mainstream has thought "right" before. The browser in "Code Browser" (http://code-browser.sourceforge.net/images/code-browser-pane.png) is awesome, as is the general source navigation demo (http://code-browser.sourceforge.net/demo.html). The multi-editing capabilities of SubEthaEdit (http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/collaborate.html) blow me away every time (I've been waiting for wxPython to wrap the multi-indicator build of Scintilla for over a year so that I can implement it myself :P ). I do think that Leo does things differently from other editors that came before and exist currently, so in that sense, *I* think that Edward's doing a great job. The real question is whether Edward can get people who write and love their own editors to drop them in favor of Leo ;) . Just my 2 cents. - Josiah
