Tom Allard writes:
Tom> Back in the days when I logged in over an HDS terminal, I could see the
Tom> advantage of all this. But in a modern X environment I would rather not.
Tom> Netscape is a fine browser, exmh is an excellent mail reader, tkman is
Tom> the best man page browser I've seen, bash supports scrollable history,
Tom> etc. Why would I want to do everything in Emacs when there's so many
Tom> other packages that do what they do best? I want an editor to be used for
Tom> editing.
Matter of taste. Editing is the main usage I have for it too. It's
true that modern environments have performant tools (netscape and the like).
However, it's not enough to have plenty of performing tools to make a good
environement. They have to communicate cleverly with each other. Emacsen are
good for that, and they were laregely conceived as `desktops' as we know them
now with KDE of Gnome. It's very probable that mature desktops will decrease
the usage of Emacsen for other things than editing in the future. However, I
still see several reasons to "live" in Emacs:
* I don't like mouses. I have 10 fingers and I like fast keystrokes. It's
amazing what you can do with 10 fingers, and at what speed you can do it :-)
This means that for instance, I prefer to type `M-x man' and get a manpage
with hyperlinks and all the stuff you want in the same window, rather than
grabbing the mouse, chaging window, read, regrab the mouse, return.
* I like to configure /in depth/ the stuff that I use. Emacs is the most
configurable piece of code I've ever seen, and will probably stay so for a
long time.
* editing/compiling/debugging
Tom> What really sets vim apart is that it is a *modal* editor. That means the
Tom> same keys do different things depending on the mode (normal mode, insert
Tom> mode, visual mode, etc). The advantage is that you can do 99% of your
Tom> editing without taking your fingers off the home row. You don't need to
Tom> use the cursor keys, page up/down, home, end and all the others. You
Tom> *can* use those keys, but you can also just keep your fingers where they
Tom> belong.
All of this apply to Emacs as well, I think. What's funny about Emacs
is that either you can't stand the appearant complexity of the keystrokes and
the like, or it becomes soon a religion.
--
/ / _ _ Didier Verna http://www.inf.enst.fr/~verna/
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