A meaningless editor warMany people like to debate which editor is the best. The biggest controversy is between Emacs and vi. vi supporters like to say: "Look it's very fast to type in vi, our fingers no need to leave the keyboard, we even no need to use the up,down,left and right keys" Emacs supporters often downplayed this and said: "What's the use of typing fast if I just need to press one key and it equals to dozens keys you type in vi?"In fact, there is another group of people who like to say: "About the war between Emacs and vi, my answer is {jEdit Geany, TextMate, Sublime ..." These peo...

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questionsabout configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they oftencome and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all?Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio muchbetter? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and haveintellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right?I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I stillcling to Emacs. Believe me, I don’t think I have any emotionalattachment to Emacs; the reason I canno...

I've been using MacVIM as my editor of choice for a couple of years now, yetin many ways I still feel like a beginner. Every day I am learningmore and more about my editor, but it takes a conscious effort to become proficient withan editor like Vim. Here's why I make that effort.Editors are something that are very personal; they have to fit with your ownwork flow approach to programming. If you have ever stopped to think about it,the way each person goes about editing text is quite different. I frequentlypair program with colleagues and I find it amazing, and sometimes frustrating,to see how o...

I’ve had an off/on relationship with Vim for the past many years.Before, I never felt like we understood each other properly. Vim isalmost useless without plugins and some essential settings in .vimrc, but fiddling with all the knobs andinstalling all the plugins that I thought I needed was a process that inthe end stretched out from few hours to weeks, months even; and it theend it just caused frustration instead of making me a happier coder.Recently, I decided to give Vim another shot. This time around it wasdifferent – something in my brain switched and now for the first ti...

I have been using Emacs for over a year now. I actually didn’t learn a lot when I started using it (just the basics to get going and then some relatively common keyboard shortcuts), but lately I have been reading and learning much more about it. I’m so grateful by everything I’ve learned from different people on the net that I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve learned, and a simple major mode for editing AsciiDoc documents.As a long-time VIM user, I feel it’s my duty to make a micro-introduction to Emacs to VIM users (skip this whole paragraph if you...

PreludeIf you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.Neal StephensonIn the Beginning … Was the Command LineI’m an Emacs user and I’m proud of the fact. I know my reasons for using it (and loving it) for many years now. But many people don’t. I often get asked by various people the same qu...

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (ok, maybe twice, invariably, on every third usage the sorter would jam and that would be really reall...