On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 18:22, Jeff Westman wrote:
> Incidently, emacs has a 'dired mode' (directory editor) which is
> very nice... much like the old 'list' shareware in DOS land of the
> dark past.... you can bring up a list of files (like 'ls -l'), then
> view and selectively execute or delete all that you mark. It's
> very nice, and it can also be used when accessing remote servers.
> Not to mention it allows syntax highlighting.
Yes, and since Emacs is built on top of a LISP interpreter you can
customize it till your hearts content -- including changing the regular
expressions emacs matches files with in Dired mode.
> As driex pointed out, it is the start-up time that is preferred in
> vi/vim. But again, a true emacs die-hard never exits the "editor"
> and does all his/her tasks inside the of it.
I'd like to add that emacs allows a "Server Mode". So you start it up
once every time you boot, it runs nicely in the background, and whenever
you need to edit a file you use emacs in client mode (i.e. type
emacsclient instead of emacs).
> Not to mention, the learning curve for emacs is horrific.
I spent a lot of time learning both Vi and Emacs when I first came to
the *nix world. Both sides had some very smart people with very good
arguments as to why one was better then the other. So I figured the
best way to figure out which one was best for me was to spend a couple
hours mucking around with each one.
I ended up choosing Emacs because, despite the learning curve, it's a
damned good IDE. In emacs I can view packages, methods, and a bunch of
other code related things in the speedbar, and I have found I code much
faster in Emacs then vi (by over a thousand lines a day).
Most of it boils down to the fact that 30% of code tends to be
reusable. For instance, take the following:
my $query = qq+SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar = "baz"+;
my $result = $DBI_connection->prepare($query)
or die("Can't prepare $query because $!");
$result->execute
or die("Can't execute $query because $!");
I've created an Emacs macro that will allow me to type three keys,
and everything with the exception of the contents of the query are
created. Then I fill in the query and hit alt } and I'm at the next
point in my code. It's much quicker then I ever could have done under
vi.
Throw into that abbreviation mode (you can define "abbreviations", so
type the abbreviation and have it automatically expand, i.e. every time
I type [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] might be automatically replaced). This,
again, increases my efficiency because I can fly through code and many
common mistakes are automatically corrected.
Now, vi may have support for some of the features I've listed above.
(For instance Vi does have macros, but it's not built atop a programming
language like LISP so I'd assume they're not that powerful...But that's
conjecture). But the point is that ***I*** liked emacs better, so I use
emacs. Because it's more efficient for ***me***. It may be that for
***you*** Ed, or another editor may be a better choice.
I encourage everyone to try out all the alternatives out there to make
up his or her own mind,
-Dan
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