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Comment by wglb | Hacker News Reader

I have come to the conclusion that IDEs are overrated. I did exactly what hga notes otherwise here when I used Visual Studio--I edited with Emacs, compiled and built with VS.

I now use Emacs for everything. It has just enough pieces to be able to configure the task you want to do. In particular, I make heavy use of key mappings, for example, F11 to the compile command, which defaults to "make -k -f Makefile".

VIM is highly configurable--several at work use it. Two of our more experienced guys use Pico.

Check out "Coders at Work" to see what the truly serious programmers of our time use for IDEs. Short form, none.

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I believe Emacs already had that bound to C-c C-c by default.

Emacs has all sorts of things bound to C-c C-c, depending on the mode. It's common enough that it's worth checking what it does in the current mode (With C-h C-k C-c C-c, of course).

First off, it would be "C-h k C-c C-c", not "C-h C-k C-c C-c" -- "C-h k" runs describe-key on the next shortcut typed.

Idiomatically, "C-c C-c" usually means something like "commit" - send an e-mail, compile source (by starting make), etc.

C-h m (the mnemonic is "help,mode") lists all the bindings for a give mode.

Also, pressing a prefix followed by C-h (i.e., "C-c C-h") defaults to listing all keybindings with that prefix. (Sometimes there are bindings replacing that, though, like "C-x C-h", which is delete-region.)

The funny thing is, I definitely would have typed "C-h k" in emacs. The hard part is trying to translate from muscle memory back into a string I can write down on HN.

Coincidentally I'm reading "Coders at Work" right now and it somewhat inspired me to write this post!

I'm a total newbie to Emacs - where can I find it for Windows, the last few times there have been an 'IDEs suck!' post on hacker news I've gone looking for it, and have found different versions, and dead links. What version do you use and where did you get it?

See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryWThirtyTwo for a discussion of versions of Emacs for Windows.

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