Comment by michael_h | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_h | Hacker News Reader

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As with all things, if you don't like it, that's okay. If you're productive in ST3, great!

For me, it was the realization that emacs can be configured to do anything you want. If you don't like how it works (and you probably won't), you can change it. Do you wish that Alt-<left arrow> would delete all of the whitespace in front of your cursor and translate the rest of the line to piglatin? You can to that. Do you want to send a copy of your file to an ftp site in addition to your local disk when you hit 'save'? And also push to github? Go for it. I guess you could say that you get out of it what you put into it. I sometimes find the auto-complete in emacs a bit lacking and I'll try another editor/IDE, but once I find something I don't like and I can't change it, I'll go back.

That being said, I think you're probably right that it is better in general and other tools can be better in specific situations.

So what you posted here...this is what I want to see in the OP's otherwise well-intentioned guide. I can say "yes" to a lot of those things, and "maybe" to the others...Don't get me wrong, I love learning new things, especially languages...but in this case, we're talking about a tool that is critical for me to learning other things...when writing an evangelism guide, the saying, "show don't tell", is even more urgent.

That said, I'm going to hold off of emacs at the moment. My goal has still been to learn vim :)

I think the learning curve of Emacs is much easier than vim. You still have a GUI that exposes most of the important functions, and can learn the key bindings as you go. You can start using Emacs for basic editing without actually knowing how to "use" it.

Like gvim or macvim.

I remember back before I knew how to use vim (I was an Emacs guy then) it was a nightmare when I would forget to set my EDITOR variable and get dropped into vi to write commit messages; I couldn't edit my way out of a paper bag and could never remember how to exit without saving, though after a while ':q!' became the only vim command I knew.

Also, and this is weird, you can get vi bindings in emacs through editing modes like viper-mode or evil. So if you want, in emacs you can have both.

In contrast, you will never see emacs inside of vim.

Hah! The way vim extensions are going you'll have emacs-in-vim soon enough. Not that I think it's a good idea, mind you. People spend too much time in vim as-is. (it's fine for emacs; that one's essentially a desktop environment)

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