oh hello there stranger. today, this measly intern was asked to do stuff, urm, like some work. well not actually. i was asked to do some comparisons.

so that’s what we’re going to do today? we’re going to fight? is that it? heh, well, we’re on the internet, what else we have to do eh?

so what are we going to fight about? pc vs. macs? nyah. too old and boring. windows vs mac os vs linux? haha.

hahaha.

no!

so urm, it’s like this, first comparison for the day, vim vs emacs.

as you know, or read before (if you haven’t.. stop! right now, go back and read my previous awesome adventures.) i installed vim in my linux system to be used as a text editor within the terminal it self.

as soon as i posted that, one of my friends (hello kaveen aka mr.enigma) asked me to use emacs. for a second i was like what is that. up on “research”, i found out that is another editor like vim. and the following day, my supervisors also asked me to use emacs as well. so, doing a comparison was just doing the obvious.

so, i installed both on my system and had a go. both had some excellent features. (i sound too politically correct now.)

vim operates inside the terminal itself. whilst this gives a more technical touch, the gui in emacs is quite easy to bargain with. i felt that getting used to emacs was way easier than remembering the key commands in vim. so learning curve wise, emacs looks a bit better.

both use syntax coloring but emacs was still better at this.

as you can see, the syntaxes are highlighted in a better way in emacs, i think this is due to it’s rich gui and vi faces limitations when it comes to being inside the terminal itself.

upon reading further into this, i read emacs have a performance issue as it gets some extra time to load, maybe due to the gui and the extensive markup, but i don’t think this affects that much in todays pc performance standards.

emacs, out of the box can be used as an i.d.e, whereas vim has to get some plug-ins to do the same tasks.

vim, certainly is the choice for a quick edit, but for some extensive usage, i’d go for emacs.

when it comes to commands, vim takes a leap as most commands on vim are shorter while emacs mostly go to combination of keys. so, when considering the number of key strokes per function, vim takes win. heh, that rhymed.

emacs allow multiple clients to get involved with the same emacs instance and share the buffer list, here vim fails.

well, all in all both emacs and vim serves the basic purposes equally. only when considering the extensive functions, they start to differ from each other. you can read more about this on wikipedia, editor war. this war is certainly well equipped and goes some considerable time back. damn.

above comic was sent to me by my supervisor. this explains the humor between the war doesn’t it? 😛

yeah that’s about it for vim vs emacs from me.

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next up, intellij idea vs other ides

intellij, out of the box have a lot of plug-ins included, this surpasses eclipse by a great leap but netbeans almost go hand in hand when considered in this aspect.

constant and thorough indexing in intellij makes navigation inside a large code base much more efficient than others.

code completion, renaming suggestions are way better in intellij considering to both eclipse and netbeans.

android studio. well, now you know what’s up. google killed off eclipse adt plug-in as they released android studio. and android studio is based on intellij. anyone who has use android studio will know the efficiency and how easy it is to develop an android app inside intellij, android studio.

intellij has a better repository integration. this outshines that of eclipse and even netbeans.

gui building is more efficient and comfortable for use in intellij. 😛

overall learning time is considerably low on intellij, this almost go hand in hand with netbeans where as eclipse kinda has a crude ui.

refactoring support and version control integration out of the box in intellij is superior to that of eclipse and netbeans.

all in all, latest versions of neatbeans and intellij are getting better and better. you can read more about these on reddit (this forum is funny as hell) and www.javacodegeeks.com. 😂

reading these forums made me realize something, play to your strengths. and make sure you’re damn good at it.

so with this, i shall close the “linux, coffee and other stuff” posts. next day, something new, well, mix up your coffee tastes eh? 😛

until the next time. ☕