Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Marc Weber <marco-oweber@gmx.de> writes:

> I've been starting to learn Vim in the first place because I
> felt hitting meta- and ctrl- all the time would hurt my fingers

Yes, it hurt my fingers bad for a while. I solved it by wearing
gloves with cut fingers (like the one burglar use), and, instead
of the Meta key, I setup another prefix key, C-o [1], as well as
the shell-like-CLI described in another thread, on M-i. It is
actually not the Meta key, but M-x, that is my problem.

> You cannot compare Vim & Emacs, neither should you.

Why not?

> Both are well suited to edit "text", thus to write emails.

Are there vim equivalences for rmail and Gnus?

> If anybody prefers one over the other its a very personal
> preference.

No, it can be analyzed. I haven't used vim 1% of my Emacs time, so
I'm not the person to do it, though.

> So this thread might end up being yet another flame war.

All threads might end up in flame wars. But we are not flaming
now, and I'm not about to, either.

> Without giving reasons your sentence looks like being a personal
> preference only. So we should not comment on it.

So your comment is that we should not comment on it...

> WTF - never heared about IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans, JEdit,
> notepad++ and what not?

I've heard of Eclipse, Netbeans, and notepad++, and I know enough
about them to never, *ever* trade Emacs for that. I mean... sure,
you can program on my TI-83 calculator (in Basic) - or you can do
O's and 1's in a cave well, with a stone axe. But I never met a
programmer who did that, and I don't think that is by chance.

> And there are many many many blogs which get written in browsers
> probably (?) (Think about the facebook community alone)

I hate FB and blogs (the technology that is, I know there are good
blog posts), and the bare thought of writing in a browser is
repulsive. (Unless the browser is Emacs-w3m.)

> Also there are "multiple forks of Emacs" - talking about one
> Emacs could be too limited.

I talk about GNU Emacs on a Linux or otherwise Unix system.

> Let's say it differently: Just because you cannot imagine
> programmers using tools others than Emacs/Vim, it doesn't mean
> that no such programmers/programs exist. "The black swan" is a
> book dedicated to this topic.

Let's put it this way: all the programmers I've met who I have
respect for, as programmers and otherwise, use Emacs or Vim.

> Eg one thing which comes to my mind is "disassemblers", there
> are some dedicated tools which eventually outperform Emacs.

What's that?

> Well - emacs can display images, Vim cannot. So yes, Emacs
> eventually is better for some latex tasks.

The LaTeX mode is very helpful. I don't use Emacs to show the
PDFs, as I always use Emacs in a Linux VT. I just switch to X with
M-u and check the PDF file in xpdf.

> And depending on what you need, neither Vim nor Emacs should be
> the tool of your choice, or can Emacs do VBA completion !? :-)
> (I didn't look it up, maybe it even can, but I think writing
> Word macros should still be done using the Word Macro editor)

It *is* Emacs or Vim. 100%. Why on earth would you use Word (?!) -
at all, ever? What would you need it for?

> Thus unless there is a particular use case the whole discusion
> is pretty much void IMHO.

For a void discussion, you sure had a lot to say.

[1]

(defun init-C-o-prefix ()
  (interactive)
  (define-prefix-command 'C-o-prefix)
  (global-set-key "\C-o" 'C-o-prefix)
  (init-C-o-keys) )
(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'init-C-o-prefix)

(defun init-C-o-keys ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((map (current-global-map)))
    (define-key map "\C-o1" 'delete-other-windows)
    (define-key map "\C-o2" 'split-window-vertically)
    (define-key map "\C-os" 'web-search)
    ; etc.
    ))

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573