From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Jan 26 9:43:29 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from ind.alcatel.com (postal.xylan.com [208.8.0.248]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DD56714C9B; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:43:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from mailhub.xylan.com (mailhub [198.206.181.70]) by ind.alcatel.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.1 (ind.alcatel.com 3.0 [OUT])) with SMTP id JAA17110; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:39:00 -0800 (PST) X-Origination-Site: Received: from omni.xylan.com by mailhub.xylan.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (mailhub 2.1 [HUB])) id JAA24638; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:38:59 -0800 Received: from softweyr.com (dyn0.utah.xylan.com [198.206.184.236]) by omni.xylan.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.1 (Xylan engr [SPOOL])) with ESMTP id JAA02894; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:38:57 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <388F3254.CF5F1C41@softweyr.com> Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 10:43:48 -0700 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jonathon McKitrick Cc: "Jonathan M. Bresler" , vanderh@ecf.utoronto.ca, dillon@apollo.backplane.com, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: kern/13644 References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Jonathon McKitrick wrote: > > Well, right now i'm trying to decide if emacs is worth the trouble. I just > decided to start using VIM, and i love it. It is very efficient, and does > what i need for now. I realize i should probably use Emacs eventually > but it seems too much trouble than it is worth for right now. VIM > seems so efficient for deletes, copying, search-and-replace, and the like. > And VIM has nice syntax highlighting. Plus it loads quickly. The thing > that bugs me about emacs is remembering the extra keys- control, alt, > meta, escape, etc. It seems easy to mix up C-c and M-c and Alt-c. It depends on what you're doing. If you make large, complicated changes, or large, complicated programs, Emacs can help you manage that complexity. It's ability to hold numerous source files open in buffers, to move back and forth between the buffers, and to assist you in keyword searches in the source, are quite valuable. When I first decided to learn Emacs, I was starting a brand new project. I bought the O'Reilly "Learning GNU Emacs" book and promised I would give Emacs two weeks, then decide if I wanted to go back to vi and multiple xterms. Hah! At the end of two weeks I was reading mail in Emacs, using vmail mode. Any decision was made on the third day when I learned how to create a TAGS file and do tags-searches within Emacs. Two days later learning about Emacs built-in support for RCS and CVS really put the nail in vi's coffin. As for load time, you haven't quite grokked the Emacs philosophy. You don't load Emacs to edit a file; you load Emacs when you login, so it's always available when you need to edit a file. If you want a command-line editor, start the Emacs server in your .emacs file and set your EDITOR to emacsclient. It took you years to learn vi; you should give Emacs a serious try before you write it off. I think it highly likely it will increase your productivity in many common programming tasks. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message