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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty much the definition of "cursed".

I'm reminded of the much more positive story from Steve Yegge about a customer service system at Amazon that used Emacs as its UI. Apparently the customer-service reps loved it, and missed using Emacs when the transition was made to an all-new Java app.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

(C-f "When Amazon got its start")

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Look, you might think this is cursed.

I worked for a subsidiary of Capgemini, German ATC system as well, a couple years later, and I'd have welcomed a message router in undocumented elisp. It would've been a very clear step up.

I had a moment where I considered switching to emacs when reading that section. Would love to see the workflow of one of the devs from that time.

You might still consider giving it a try. There is a learning curve, but it's a sigmoid with a remarkable slope past the first knee; I don't necessarily buy all of Yegge's boosterism, but I will say that in those places where I've had the reputation of getting stuff done that no one else could and faster than anyone expected, it's been my skill with Emacs that gave rise to the large majority of that reputation.

(I don't necessarily no-sell all that boosterism, either. The most basal ancestor of today's GNU Emacs dates to the mid-1970s; if the 'Lindy effect' holds true, it really is the 100-year editor.)

I'm not shocked. Same story with Wordperfect and all its F-keys, and keyboard shortcuts, over Word and its mouse driven UI. Secretaries at the time hated the change.

Text input is so much faster, and of you're typing a lot, keyboard <-> mouse movements slow you down.

I'm still learning how powerful all of Emacs' navigation bindings can be, and I've been using it exclusively since 2010. Never leaving the home row, and not needing a weird keyboard or a million fragile overrides, is a superpower - and one that also applies anywhere GNU readline is available.

I decided to switch to Emacs reading this too. I was a fervent of the Vim church, but now I see the light.

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