Comment by palish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by palish | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't present any reasons to switch to Emacs, just reasons why he had not previously switched.

I realize that the editor war has passionate individuals on both sides of the fence, so I'll choose my words carefully.

In terms of Emacs versus Vim, I'm agnostic. It seems like as long as you're not doing the hand-on-mouse-hand-on-keyboard dance then you've solved the Editing Problem. Maybe some people have become super-productive after switching from one editor to the other, but it seems rare.

Personally, I was introduced to Vim a couple years ago by a coworker. I liked the idea of never using the mouse while editing, so I memorized the new workflow and haven't looked back. There are two reasons why I haven't been interested in switching to Emacs:

1) The Vim key bindings have been burned into my brain over the course of two years. I even close popup dialogs by accident sometimes, because I often press the ESC key after typing anything.

2) The ViEmu Visual Studio plugin ( http://www.viemu.com/ ). As far as I know, there isn't an Emacs equivalent. And yet, even if there were, why switch to it? The value is in the ability to not take your hands off the keyboard, which the Vim key bindings already provide. So that would simply be trading one set of key bindings for another.

In summary, certain tools work for certain people. As long as people are using quality tools, why does it matter which one is used?

Because the article it is only part 1 of (2-3), right?

-- Hence, I've decided to write a small (2-3) series of blog posts on the issue, to future memory. The post you are reading is about why, since a few months ago, I wasn't willing to give Emacs a try, and how I've changed my mind. --

Cool, I look forward to them.

I still do the mouse-keyboard dance because switching windows, and switching input fields within windows, in the Windows OS is so awkward (or sometimes impossible) with a keyboard. Maybe Windows 7 needs iswitchb mode or something.

So, The Editing Problem exists in the context of an entire OS not just a single window, but on top of that it's not just about moving the cursor and changing the text - text editing can be improved when the program has the ability to work with the text on a higher level, e.g. changing the serial number in a zone file instead of changing line 3 chars 10-20.

Emacs is more suited to this style of work because of its built-from-its-own-scripting-language spaghetti nature.

Which brings me to my last point - the biggest problem with text editing is all those stupid, different, difficult to parse, non-lisp file formats that Linux is littered with! Grr! And XML! Grr^2! ;)

"The ViEmu Visual Studio plugin... As far as I know, there isn't an Emacs equivalent."

Visual Studio 2005 has a built-in option to use Emacs keybindings.

That's because many key VS contributors are Emacs users! Sometimes, during heavy code churn, major features break or otherwise can't be trusted. You have to revert to your text editor of choice and printf style debugging.

I like the the "hand-on-mouse-hand-on-keyboard dance" because in web programming you're often typing just a few lines into a file and then switching to another file. Using a mouse with a GUI file tree is a hell of a lot easier than anything the ancient text editors offer.

Maybe he was just bored. Even though that may not be a good reason to switch, if I'm completely honest, it has been the reason for many of my own switches from one technology to another.

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