Thursday, March 28

6 Comments

  1. Daniel Stoddart on

    Don’t forget the original GNU Emacs, “the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor.” I use it for *everything*, almost. On some *nix systems, the icon for Emacs is an overflowing sink–apropros, no? I call it a thermonuclear text editor or a word processor on steroids. Is it an editor, or is it a complete IDE? You be the judge.

    I spend about 80% of my workday in this environment. It has tons of programming language modes (C, C++, PHP, Perl, HTML-helper, Python, &c., &c.). It’s at v.21, and it never, ever crashes.

  2. Bah!!!! Vi is the name of the game you emacs people!! A pox on the lot of ya.

    Hehe actually I don’t really have that much feeling either way. I just learned vi first so I tend to use it more

    I’ve never crashed Vi either and its still the best Html/ASP/Javascript editor I have found for Linux (besides the rather long learning curve of emacs that is).

  3. Daniel Stoddart on

    Ha! This debate has been the basis for many a flame war over on slashdot. I learned vi first too, but I got tired of always hitting the ESC key to change modes. I guess what I liked about Emacs was the modelessness.

    As for learning curves, I have heard a lot of people say that. But if you do the Emacs tutorial most simple editing tasks are easy…CTRL P/B/F/V…navigation, deleting, yanking, pasting &c are a snap.

    One area where I do think vi is superior is the ergonomic front, which is important. Using j/k to scroll on the middle row of keys is certainly more natural than Emacs contortions. The knuckle on my left pinky sometimes locks and won’t bend because of 15 years of CTRL key use.