I do all my programming in Emacs and use vi or mg* for sysadmin-ing, basically. I started using Emacs when I was learning Common Lisp and was blown away by Marc

I do all my programming in Emacs and use vi or mg* for sysadmin-ing, basically. I started using Emacs when I was learning Common Lisp and was blown away by Marco Baringer's SLIME (http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/) video. I had been using vi/vim for 4-5 years before that. * a mini-Emacs, basically core Emacs without the extensibility. If it wasn't installed on OpenBSD by default, I would probably just use nvi in its place. That said, using vi(m) for Lisp is not that hard. Paul Graham says he uses vi in his programming FAQ (http://paulgraham.com/pfaq.html http://paulgraham.com/pfaq.html). Mainly, you just need a good setup for "copy this block of code to the repl", "reload the file I just saved", and the like. A bit of integration greatly reduces friction, and Lisp development is all about reducing friction for quick experimentation and testing. (Not so sure about doing Emacs Lisp in vi, though... ;) )