On 6/14/2017 12:05 PM, Richard Melville wrote:
I was always a vim user, but I've been using emacs for about a year and
I really like it. ...
As I say, in the past I've always been a vim user. I avoided emacs
because it always seemed as though it was trying to be all things to all
people. It never seemed quite unix enough: one tool to do one job.
However, I started using it last year in earnest and I'm impressed with
the power of it (particularly the number of additional modules). I'm
probably unusual in that I always have both vim and emacs installed and
use them both. I know that there are a few lightweight editors out
there, but because I'm used to vim I tend to use it for quick edits to
files and reserve emacs for large projects.
I almost always use vim, partly because I'm used to it and partly
because I can edit stuff quite a bit faster than with emacs. Emacs needs
more keystrokes to do the same job, often enough that I've found it
annoying. Also, on my job I sometimes found that the "ed" or "ex"
component of "vi" was needed, and keeping up with vi kept me up with the
"ex" commands. These are largely the same as from the ancient "ed"
editor from lineprinter days.
When I was a student at MIT from 1979 onward, I worked part time at the
AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence), where Richard Stallman had worked for
several years after dropping his CS program. He had become a fixture
there, and wrote the first version of Emacs in an old editor (Teco?)
that had impossible syntax. Emacs became the de facto editor for the AI
Lab and ran on old DEC machines. Eventually a grad student named Bernie
Greenberg ported Emacs to Lisp, and eventually others ported versions to
Unix. Emacs has so many features and abilities that some people do all
their computer work from it -- programming, whatever. Stallman, of
course, went on to found the GNU organization and the Free Software
Foundation.
Alan
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