From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-11-26T23:50:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Tool Survey

Giles Bowkett wrote:
> (one surprising thing: reading the emacs Lisp for the Ruby syntax
> coloring support. I was much less enthused than I had expected to be -
> hundreds of lines of code, none of the OO structure I'm used to - I've
> seen Perl that was easier to read, at least in the "table of
> contents"/"which sections do what" sense.)

Emacs and Lisp are so tightly interbred from many decades of co-use that

a. Unless you know Lisp fairly well, it's tough to hack on emacs, and
b. It's tough to find a better editor for Lisp.

Hard-core Lisp programmers probably are incapable of using an IDE other 
than emacs anyway. :) I never learned emacs -- I was told that it was a 
memory hog, and since I wasn't getting paid to develop Lisp, I used the 
editor I was given rather than force the issue.

> anyway, I was always a vi guy, but then I switched to TextMate, but
> then I got tired of it and started looking into emacs, and for sheer
> power it looks like the king. so a screencast on features of vi I
> didn't know about is definitely very useful to me.

Well ... there's "vi" and then there's Vim 7.x. :) The original vi is a 
nice, compact, regular-expression-based visual editor that will function 
well on a dumb terminal. Vim 7.x, on the other hand, has a lot of new 
features, including GVim, a semi-happy marriage of vim and a 
Notepad-like GUI editor. Vim 7.x is probably close to the feature count 
of emacs by now, while the original vi was something you could learn 
just about all of in an afternoon.

To throw another monkey wrench into the discussion, I rather like SciTe. 
The underlying "scintilla" widgets integrate well with scripting 
languages like Ruby and Python, and it's cross-platform.
>