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Comment by piyush_soni | Hacker News Reader

How would the people who have used both compare Emacs with Notepad++? I find Notepad++ beautiful, if not sexy :).

Forget the fact that you can check your email, browse the internet, run a shell from inside email. In Notepad++ you need to take your hands off the main keyboard and use the arrow keys if you want to move around. In emacs you use C-n C-p C-b C-f. That is enough reason to not use Notepad++

Not that I don't take my hands of the keyboard, but what do you really NEED to use the mouse for? You can use the KB to hit any item in the menus, there are tons of shortcuts, and the point and click menus are mostly related to configuration and settings, though those are technically mostly accessible via KB too.

I personally use Sublime Text when I'm not using VS2013/R# these days though.

Really? You'd use multiple key combination to navigate instead of a simple arrow key? Strange. So if you have to move forward by many points do you keep pressing both c and f keys? I find that an uncomfortable key combination ...

And why would you want to check email and browse internet in a Text Editor? Funny.

I've used both. Notepad++ doesn't give you twisted willow-like hands like emacs and all the meta key love.

I'm now recovering using vim and have a big pinky for escape usage.

inoremap jj <esc> is what you need. Allows one to double press j to enter normal mode instead of reaching for the Esc key.

Interesting! Will try that - thanks :)

believe it or not, 'jk' is actually faster as you don't wait for the 'j' key to travel back up. You get so used to it though, you get upset when it's not there by default. I find it's one of the first things I do when I open vim on another machine.

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