[ale] I can see why RHEL people don't use Emacs...

[Lightner, Jeff]

Even after being taught how to use emacs years ago in a training class where the software maker thought it was "da bomb" I went right back to using vi when I got back to my office because I simply couldn't see any great benefit of emacs.   The funny thing is the discussion about emacs being a Linux abomination.  I first saw it on UNIX long before I started working on any Linux system.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of mike at trausch.us
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 11:41 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] I can see why RHEL people don't use Emacs...

On 02/08/2012 09:55 PM, Greg Clifton wrote:
> Wolf,  sounds like MT would be your drinking buddy for that exercise ;-)

LOL!

I don't actually do VC stuff from within my editor.  I tend to commit a
single change set (which often means changing multiple files).  I have
used Emacs' built-in VC interface for simple single-line changes, but
nothing really more than that.  Even then, I often tend to ignore it,
because I'm in the habit of having a (no, wait, several) terminal
windows open at once.  Sometimes multiple terminal windows running
different tmux instances, even.  :-)

Most of what I use Emacs for is programming of one sort or another.
Before I started using Emacs sometime in about 2005, I used vim nearly
exclusively, sometimes playing with things like gedit and the like.

I really was tired of the modal interface that vi(m) presents for
everyday work, which was part of the reason that I decided to check out
Emacs.  The first time I tried it, I went back to vim in less than an
hour.  But as time went on and I grew more tired of the way vim worked,
the more I played in Emacs until I grew to depend on it as an everyday tool.

Now, by no means will you *ever* hear me argue that anyone who uses
Linux or UNIX systems professionally should ignore vi or any of its
(non-)extended clones.  It can be very useful to know vi; after all,
there are still even today some systems that ship with it as the only
editor.  I would actually argue that it is also still a Good Idea(tm) to
know how to use ksh, just as much as it is for vim, sed, awk, or
whatever else you can think of out of the UNIX toolbox.

Note: I am aware of precisely ONE general-purpose Linux-based system
that ships with neither vim nor Emacs by default, as if to skirt the
issue entirely; it ships only nano by default, and you have to choose
vim, Emacs or both.  The odd thing is that it's Gentoo.  Shipping nano
by default seems rather uncharacteristic, given its target audience!

Personally, I have both vim and Emacs on my system (and I actually had
to install both of them).  I *rarely* use vim anymore, though,
preferring the use of sed to vim because sed fits better in shell
pipelines.  But the main reason that I use Emacs is because I can very
easily make it do what I want in a matter of seconds the first time, and
almost no time at all the next.

If only I could teach it to write my code for me...!  :-D

        --- Mike

--
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, "Logic"





Athena(r), Created for the Cause(tm)
Making a Difference in the Fight Against Breast Cancer

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