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Comment by jfb | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm a graybeard, but I have yet to see a serious editor on any platform that could get me to switch away from Emacs. The perils of 20+ years of muscle memory and accumulated knowledge, I suppose.

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Emacs also has the advantage that, whatever you decide to throw at it, it'll probably do it pretty well. It may not be the absolute best editor for one given language or environment, but you can be sure that it will handle it well, and of course you'll get all the other stuff with it that that one editor for the one language probably doesn't have.

My Emacs history only goes back 5 years.

A number of days ago, I downloaded Textmate and started playing with it. In the beginning I almost wanted to just delete it and go back to Emacs. But as time went on, its simplicity became increasingly pleasant; so last night, I purchased a license.

To me, it's good to know that innovation in text editing is not over. I don't think that Textmate is the last word by any means but it is a beautiful tool and I'm curious to see how Chocolat stacks up.

"The perils of 20+ years of muscle memory and accumulated knowledge, I suppose."

This cuts both ways. For people whose muscle memory is attuned to the standard Mac or Windows shortcuts and UI conventions, Chocolat (or Textmate, or some Windows text editor) might be more appealing.

That sounds pretty limited to copy/cut/paste and opening and saving. If you're doing heavy editing, and more so if you're using the editor for programming, you won't find that much use for standard shortcuts.

For Emacs, there's also Aquamacs and CUA mode, which use the "native" shortcuts as you'd expect.

Of course. I wouldn't try and force Emacs down the throat of someone who was just looking for a simple text editor; but by the same token, it is at times wearying to read about "innovations" in editing that Stallman implemented 20 years ago. And so it goes.

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