I’ve been conducting an experiment over the last few weeks. I decided
to put my money where my mouth was and try out a different editor for
a little while. I plan on trying a few editors out, and Emacs was my first stop.. Emacs has a crazy learning curve.
The good thing is once you figure out the basics and learn a couple of
important keystrokes, you’ll be able to get along quiet nicely. My fingers don’t mind any of M or C now.
The main reason I wanted to try something different than Textmate is
because I was missing split windows. Split windows make me feel so
productive. Emacs has a pretty good implementation, and I found myself
with a code window, a terminal, and an irc session up pretty much at
all times. For this Emacs definitely was a win, and after this, I
don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to an editor which doesn’t
have split windows… Nope. I’m not going to use an editor that doesn’t allow me to split my windows.
I’ve also enjoyed ERC. ERC is awesome now that I have everything
configured correctly. Actually most things are great now that I have
them configured correctly. I started out with the Emacs starter kit, and it gave me a great base to get started. #emacs on freenode has also been a huge help.
So now everything is good. Well almost everything. There are some downsides to Emacs as well.
The first problem I’ve created for myself is wanting to run
everything from Emacs itself. Emacs gives you plenty of rope, and I
took all that I could. (Good thing I didn’t hang myself) The few
times Emacs crashed, it took down my entire environment. I didn’t
lose any files; Emacs has great autosaving. I did lose my
concentration, because it was such a pain in the rear to get everything
just like it was before.
I’m a web developer. Most of my activities revolve around html and
writing code to generate html. Emacs presents more than a few tools
to get my job done. Some of the tools are better than others. I’ve
had good luck with the ruby modes. I’ve had less than stellar luck
with nxhtml: It works well enough, but way to slow for me to
incorporate it in my normal workflow.
So, what do I do now? I’m going to continue on with my experiment.
I’m moving to vim over the next week, and I’ll spend a few weeks
emersed in that environment.
Along the way, I’ve learned a few things, and you can check out my
emacs configs on
github.
I recommend everyone gives Emacs a try at least once.
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