[TriLUG] vi vs emacs

[Wing D Lizard]

I use emacs, primarily because I was 'blown away' by Lugaru's Epsilon

    http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html

This editor allowed you to have a command.com shell, and edit a file
in a second editor window AT THE SAME TIME under MSDOS ( which does
not support multitasking).  This was very advanced for it's time. 

Once I started using Epsilon, learning emacs was very easy.  Once you start
using it, your finger learn the keystrokes.

But, you have to know vi to be unix literate.  There is nothing that is
better for quick and dirty changes to configuration files.

To me, vi is a text editor -- but emacs is a development tool.  There 
are extensions
to both that allow you to do some pretty complex things, lots of 
customization.
But emacs wins out.

I've even tried eclipse, but still fall back to emacs when I need to do
heavy development.

The big features of emacs are: being able to have a shell in an editor 
window,
non-case sensitive searches ( Ctrl-s myfile matches myFile, MyFile, MYFILE,
etc), easy keyboard macros, multiple windows handling that make sense,
automatic positioning of the editor on error lines in source code, gdb
integration, code formatting ( indentation, etc), configurability, and 
of course
'Alt-x untabify' ( since tabs are evil).

b²


James Olin Oden wrote:
> On 6/26/07, Tanner Lovelace <clubjuggler at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 6/26/07, Craig Taylor <ctalkobt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Why not?
>>>
>>> Just to have a point to this thread let me ask everyone Why? for their
>>> particular choice.
>> 1. I learned emacs first.
>> 2. VI modes hurt my brain.
>> 3. Lisp is AWESOME BABY! :-)
> cause lambda calculas really rocks?
>
> ...james