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Comment by hartror | Hacker News Reader

  I use TextMate for writing code, and it does most of what I need, 
  but the allure of emacs is strong and I think that one day I will
  take the time to learn it and harness its power, but for now, I’m
  a TextMate man, and it treats me pretty well.

Oh how I love my father for teaching me the dark arts of emacs when I was 12.

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I've actually started using Vim since I wrote this post, and it's treating me nicely. I still use TextMate for a lot of things, but as I become more familiar with Vim, I find myself there more and more. It feels much more natural to me than Emacs.

I'm sure a lot of people here would love a follow-up post about your Vim setup.

Check out some of Gary Bernhardt's videos (also a play by play on Peepcode).

I stole a whole lot of things from his VIM setup (red/green bar for test runs in VIM just rocks).

Oh how I love Steve Yegge for convincing me that time that I was putting into it before was well-worth it.

Dark arts indeed. Emacs is an usability atrocity.

Usability does not mean able to understand and completely master at the first sight.

Complex problems require powerful solutions - something you actually have to work a little to learn to use.

First of all, why would you assume that by "usability" I mean "being able to understand and completely master at the first sight"?; Let me tell you why, because __some__ users of Emacs think that by learning to use some bloated piece of junk software will make them special, that by learning to use Emacs they somehow demonstrate their intellectual superiority among their mates. So you're inferring that people who don't like Emacs or prefer other editors are somehow intellectually inferior to those who learn it and use it. Well, that is not the case. In fact, if you can achieve exactly the same thing with a simpler, easier to use tool and you're still using the bloated one, it's you who is mentally retarded, not those who use the other tool. So just to conclude, just spare me and others of this bullshit. And also please note that I know what usability is, and when I wrote my previous comment I was thinking about very precise Emacs issues which I don't have time and I also don't want to discuss. But that's just the way I feel about Emacs. You might very well use and love it but please don't try to sell me your bullshit.

TextMate takes some good ideas in Emacs and improves them (from the user's perspective), like pressing Option to start a rectangular selection so you can see the selection as you make it.

Emacs is far more consistent in that basically everything is a command invoked either by keyboard shortcut or M-x, but in this case I think it hurts usability. It seems modes of any kind are not Emacs' thing, even tiny ones like rectangle selection. It could be though and that is a great strength. If someone wants it enough they can write it.

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