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Don't ever start using emacs. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have emacs key bindings will give you fits and make you cry.

Don't ever start using emacs. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have emacs key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning emacs is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be frustrated by all other software. You'll wander around trying to explain to other people why the thing you had was so good, and it was so easy, and that nothing else compares, and wouldn't it be great if everyone did things this way. You have been warned.

burke 15y ago
As someone who used emacs for five years before switching to vim, my personal experience was that the top-level comment is more true than this one.
- warp 15y ago
  As someone who used emacs for 8 years, then swiched to vim and used that for 4 years, and then switched back to emacs 2 years ago -- my personal experience is that being forced to use anything which isn't vim or emacs will give me fits and make me cry, but switching from one to the other is mostly fine.
  - chc 15y ago
    As someone who always used graphical text editors with discoverable interfaces, for a long time I found both vi and emacs to be like black boxes covered in unlabeled fiddly knobs — except turning vi's knobs in the wrong order would make some of the other knobs start spinning wildly. Just trying to get either of them to use a color scheme that didn't hurt my eyes was an exercise in frustration. I can use either passably nowadays and do use both fairly frequently, but I have to admit I still find don't find either particularly nice to use. I feel like whatever is great about them is always hidden somewhere just out of sight.
  - stock_toaster 15y ago
    As someone who has used vim for many years, tried emacs a few times and was confused and disheartened, and continued to just use vim, I can provide no useful anecdotal evidence. ;)
- tikhonj 15y ago
  That's because the Emacs comment missed Emacs's greatest feature: elisp. Adding functionality--even fairly complex functionality--to Emacs is much easier than extending any other editor I've used. Here are a couple of great examples from the last week for me: I am currently taking a compiler course where we are implementing a particular language not entirely unlike--but not entirely like--Lua and Python. As part of the process, we need to churn out quite a bit of test code. Naturally, Emacs does not support this language by default because this language only exists as an implementation exercise for a couple of projects; however, creating a useful mode that does syntax highlighting and indentation--basically all you need to program comfortably--only took about 100 lines of code and less than an hour of programming! Apart from my studies, I also work part-time at a startup. As part of this, I have to use and maintain a bunch of remote AWS machines that do all sorts of things: hosting, continuous integration, staging... I noticed that I was opening a lot of shells both locally and remotely. Writing up a command bound to a global key-stroke that prompts me for a name, opens a shell in the current directory (including remote directories!) and sets the prompt of the shell to its name literally took five minutes. And now I've saved a lot of time managing all my shells. Being able to make my editor do exactly what I want with a trivial amount of effort is magical.
- cageface 15y ago
  The deciding factor for me is that I can use the same basic Emacs keybindings in any other text entry widget, so my most central muscle memory translates to the shell, XCode, Firefox etc. Vi/Vim is off in its own weird universe.
  - burke 15y ago
    I set up most of the emacs/OS X bindings in insert mode as well, and slowly migrated away from them toward more use of vim features. It eased the transition, and now I don't really feel any mismatch between the two.
hencq 15y ago
Hehehe, yes I keep opening printer dialogs and new windows in my browser because of this. Though to be fair, that's often more due to being on Windows and not having 'focus follows mouse'.
ludwigvan 15y ago
I think a lot of other editors (even in Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse) have emacs keybindings though, so the situation is much better for an emacs user. It is much easier to implement due to modelessness of emacs.
kahawe 15y ago
"Ed is the standard text editor."

burke 15y ago

As someone who used emacs for five years before switching to vim, my personal experience was that the top-level comment is more true than this one.

warp 15y ago
As someone who used emacs for 8 years, then swiched to vim and used that for 4 years, and then switched back to emacs 2 years ago -- my personal experience is that being forced to use anything which isn't vim or emacs will give me fits and make me cry, but switching from one to the other is mostly fine.
- chc 15y ago
  As someone who always used graphical text editors with discoverable interfaces, for a long time I found both vi and emacs to be like black boxes covered in unlabeled fiddly knobs — except turning vi's knobs in the wrong order would make some of the other knobs start spinning wildly. Just trying to get either of them to use a color scheme that didn't hurt my eyes was an exercise in frustration. I can use either passably nowadays and do use both fairly frequently, but I have to admit I still find don't find either particularly nice to use. I feel like whatever is great about them is always hidden somewhere just out of sight.
- stock_toaster 15y ago
  As someone who has used vim for many years, tried emacs a few times and was confused and disheartened, and continued to just use vim, I can provide no useful anecdotal evidence. ;)
tikhonj 15y ago
That's because the Emacs comment missed Emacs's greatest feature: elisp. Adding functionality--even fairly complex functionality--to Emacs is much easier than extending any other editor I've used. Here are a couple of great examples from the last week for me: I am currently taking a compiler course where we are implementing a particular language not entirely unlike--but not entirely like--Lua and Python. As part of the process, we need to churn out quite a bit of test code. Naturally, Emacs does not support this language by default because this language only exists as an implementation exercise for a couple of projects; however, creating a useful mode that does syntax highlighting and indentation--basically all you need to program comfortably--only took about 100 lines of code and less than an hour of programming! Apart from my studies, I also work part-time at a startup. As part of this, I have to use and maintain a bunch of remote AWS machines that do all sorts of things: hosting, continuous integration, staging... I noticed that I was opening a lot of shells both locally and remotely. Writing up a command bound to a global key-stroke that prompts me for a name, opens a shell in the current directory (including remote directories!) and sets the prompt of the shell to its name literally took five minutes. And now I've saved a lot of time managing all my shells. Being able to make my editor do exactly what I want with a trivial amount of effort is magical.
cageface 15y ago
The deciding factor for me is that I can use the same basic Emacs keybindings in any other text entry widget, so my most central muscle memory translates to the shell, XCode, Firefox etc. Vi/Vim is off in its own weird universe.
- burke 15y ago
  I set up most of the emacs/OS X bindings in insert mode as well, and slowly migrated away from them toward more use of vim features. It eased the transition, and now I don't really feel any mismatch between the two.

hencq 15y ago

Hehehe, yes I keep opening printer dialogs and new windows in my browser because of this. Though to be fair, that's often more due to being on Windows and not having 'focus follows mouse'.

ludwigvan 15y ago

I think a lot of other editors (even in Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse) have emacs keybindings though, so the situation is much better for an emacs user. It is much easier to implement due to modelessness of emacs.

kahawe 15y ago

"Ed is the standard text editor."