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Comment by ezy | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes I did. :-P

I don't actually feel as strongly as this comment might sound -- use what you want to use -- but I wanted to get a dig in :-)

When I used emacs extensively (in viper mode, before Vim really was popular and good vi alternatives with filename completion existed), it really blew as a text editor without viper, and all the customizations never really worked well with one another. (Viper didn't work with anything else, typically).

In particular, the shell mode you refer to was just awful. Most of the time it would get confused by what came out of the pty -- lord help you if you happened to echo the wrong thing (e.g. binary data) by accident to the terminal.

Meanwhile, scrollback/rect select are basic features of any terminal emulator (or gnu screen), and re-replace/bookmarks in the history is a basic feature of modern shells.

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:-)

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same terminal.

M-x term is a terminal emulator that acts like xterm and obscures all the great emacs stuff. I think that thing blows.

M-x shell is a fully-featured shell that also happens to be a normal buffer. When you cat binary data to it, it just displays binary data (as control characters, most often). I usually have to use quote (C-q) to, for instance, send a KILL to the running process (C-q C-c RET). On the bright side, if I change my mind, I just delete the C-c before I hit RET and type something else.

I'm not just talking about re-replace in history (although yes it has that, along with M-/ (for me, hippie-expand) to complete with arbitrary text from any open buffer in Emacs).

I am talking about manipulating the input/output by just editing junk in the buffer. For instance, I get 10000 lines of output and just clean it up or select a region, then run a ten-line function I wrote in elisp to do some calculation on the data, in the shell buffer, without copying it anywhere else or otherwise disrupting my flow. And I never have to touch my mouse to do it.

This is the real promise, that any useful integration you do for one part of Emacs applies to every part of it, without having to learn a new set of bindings or the weird indirections you get out of combining screen plus the terminal plus the command line sql interface plus... And there are many many useful libraries that have come out over the years.

When I used emacs extensively (in viper mode

That's like saying 'when I used a 747 to drive to the corner store...'

Yes, that's right.

Gentlemen, I think the whole emacs-is-too-big point is totally obsolete in this century.

Vim eats 8-10M of my memory. Emacs with many different modes running eats 15-20M. It mattered back in 1996 when I've had 24M of RAM, heck I remember programming in emacs + X11 having as low as 16M and I survived ;)

But to the point. The difference between 10 and 20M doesn't matter anymore.

What matters is that Eclipse eats 500M of memory, is sluggish and I doubt it offers better programming experience; still so many people don't want to listen that there are alternatives to it.

I think that's the area we should debate & educate people. Both vi/emacs are brilliantly light these days.

viper mode is nice. it's mostly different keybindings...

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