In your opinion, which FOSS software is by many considered "old" or "obsolete", but are in fact, in your opinion, in many ways better than the newer alternatives?

privsecfoss@feddit.dk to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 108 points –

I'll start:

  • RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
  • XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
  • IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
  • Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
244

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Emacs. Still the best way to edit any kind of text in any context.

I came to say vim...Is the debate still a thing?

No.

There is no debate because vim is the superior editor, period.

Vim is the greatest tool ever made for manipulating text as text. Emacs is easier to modify (I <3 Lisp) and is better at handling the semantics of the text it's working with.

Also, Emacs has evil-mode now, so the only reason to still prefer Vim is 1. A strange love of vimscript, or 2. A lack of permissions to install Emacs.

I used to be on the vim side in the debates, but now that I've also used Emacs - Porque no los dos?

I've been using vim for years. Because I can't figure out how to exit it

:wq! to save and quit or :q! to just quit

zz will also quit it. Zz when vim is sleepy

Every time I see those videos I think to myself. "Man I'm still working on this shitty first brain and now I have to make a 2nd one?"

Or x, which does the same thing, with the same number of keystrokes. But the ZZ keys are closer together

Absolutely! I can't believe when I stumbled across it in 2020 that it was as old as it is. And folks think it's too old and decrepit to use, it's inanely powerful.

I found it really funny when the "second brain / knowledge base" apps (like Obidian, Joplin, Logseq) started to explode semi-recently. "Organize your thoughts! Tag everything! Elegance through simplicity! Only use markdown!"

Yeah, I get it, orgmode is a really good idea. No need to re-invent it half a dozen more times to celebrate it's 20th birthday...

And one of these days, someone will rediscover the magic of having a uniform editing environment for manipulating text in multiple different contexts.