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I started coding professional on Xcode. Then I tried a couple of other IDEs until my work in lisp required I give emacs a try. I eventually went back to other l

I started coding professional on Xcode. Then I tried a couple of other IDEs until my work in lisp required I give emacs a try. I eventually went back to other languages, mostly C++ and Python, but still use emacs. It really spoils you for text/code editing forever. Once you get passed the learning curve, every other effort to edit code or text in other programs seems ironically so archaic. What? I can't split the buffer quickly and get another one? What, I can't quickly bounce back to my previous editing window configuration, then bounce forward again? What, there is no visual undo tree? The list goes on and on. I now use the Vim emulation inside emacs which has been the killer feature in emacs to further boost productivity. And, last year I passed several rounds of technical interviews with one of the top 5 companies in SV, so perhaps I support the statistics presented here (though I did not get to use my chosen editor for the interviews, so they did not know I am an emacs user).

agumonkey 9y ago
I colleged on Eclipse. But I always had a thing for emacs (it has some parsing abilities oob, it's not just coloring and lexing). Anyway the day I finally clicked on the extensibility of emacs. Which was as trivial as defining a function, then defining a menu (which is duh.. a list). And have the GUI [1] updated I lost the remaining bit of love I had for Eclipse. I got 2 or 3 years of Eclipse JDT/PDT, all the talks about the power of plugins. It was nothing but pain. Then that old emacs gets me the same thing like it's breakfast. It hit me too hard. Lastly, I revived a win95 box, with Turbo Pascal. Another old and tiny blast from the past, and even though the 600KB IDE/compiler was amazing in most and so many regards. The fact that I was stuck with the default text editing features (no paragraph selection etc etc) made me feel what Emacs' freedom meant to me even on the tiniest instances. [1] note that I'm a keyboard fetishist, so I don't use 99% of Emacs GUI and knew most keybindings, I was just trying for the sake of learning elisp and emacs architecture.

agumonkey 9y ago

I colleged on Eclipse. But I always had a thing for emacs (it has some parsing abilities oob, it's not just coloring and lexing). Anyway the day I finally clicked on the extensibility of emacs. Which was as trivial as defining a function, then defining a menu (which is duh.. a list). And have the GUI [1] updated I lost the remaining bit of love I had for Eclipse. I got 2 or 3 years of Eclipse JDT/PDT, all the talks about the power of plugins. It was nothing but pain. Then that old emacs gets me the same thing like it's breakfast. It hit me too hard. Lastly, I revived a win95 box, with Turbo Pascal. Another old and tiny blast from the past, and even though the 600KB IDE/compiler was amazing in most and so many regards. The fact that I was stuck with the default text editing features (no paragraph selection etc etc) made me feel what Emacs' freedom meant to me even on the tiniest instances. [1] note that I'm a keyboard fetishist, so I don't use 99% of Emacs GUI and knew most keybindings, I was just trying for the sake of learning elisp and emacs architecture.