From: Tim X <timx@...>
Date: 2007-04-15T16:10:10+09:00
Subject: Re: IDEs, syntactic vs. semantic highlighting, etc.

"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@cesmail.net> writes:

>>   
> Compared to what? Emacs? Vim has come a long way, and I must confess I 
> never learned Emacs, but if I had to do serious Lisp programming, I'd 
> for sure bite the bullet and immerse myself in Emacs. Actually, the 
> reason I learned "vi" instead of "emacs" to begin with is that the 
> system folks told us not to use "emacs" because it was a memory hog. :)
>

Initially, I did the same and largely for the same reasons. I also agree 'vi'
clones have come a long way. There has been a long vi <-> emacs debate which
I've found myself confronted by many times. The problem is I tend to agree with
arguments on both sides. Many vi users will say that vi fits better with the
Unix tradition of lots of basic utilities that all do one thing well and which
can be connected or combined to do more complex things. There are many times
I've been able to create a very functional solution that has consisted of a
shell script calling various utilities and even vi to edit some data that the
utilities will work on etc. This sort of functionality would be difficult but
not impossible with emacs. However, either it would be slow or all your users
would need to be configured to use emacs.

Emacs certainly works
against that philosophy as it is nearly a complete OS (or at least an OS shell)
in and of itself. However, now after 11 years of emacs, I've certainly begun to
appreciate the benefits of an editor that allows you to also integrate into it
all the common tasks you need to do. I've noticed significant productivity
gains from the ability to run emacs and get high functioning support for
reading mail and newsgroups, editing files on remote systems via ssh or some
multi-hop system that passes through multiple remote hosts, yet, functionallly
is no different to editing a local file, integration with compilers and
debuggers,  and ability
to jump to source code locations of errors with a keystroke (for mulitple
different languages), basic web surfing (though w3m doesn't handle javascript
and other more modern web stuff), ability to heavily customize things, cut and
paste data between all these applications in a powerful and consistent way and
pretty much configure the whole thing to suit my needs rather than change my
way of working to fit the tools. Most of my interaction with the filesystem and
basic utilities is now done either through 'dired' (emacs directory/file
manipulation facility) or eshell (an emacs lisp shell). Its quite nice being
able to execute lisp expressions to do things in a shell. I also love the fact I can have all
functionality via the keyboard and don't have to use the mouse at all if I
don't want to. 

However, at the same time, when doing simple jobs or a basic sys admin config
change etc, more often than not, I will just use vi because it is quick to
start, plus I can fit it on a rescue disk (which I am unlikely to be able to do
with emacs!). I would have also admit many of the advantages of emacs that
originally got me using it are now available in vim et. al. - especially
programming tasks.

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au