Jeremy Durham

Last week was R&D week at Beacon, meaning that developers got to work on a project of their choice to increase their understanding of something they may not normally be able to work on.

While doing my R&D week I decided that now would be a good time to learn Emacs. Emacs has been on my list for the last seven or eight years, but never made it to the top.

After a week of Emacs, here’s some of the things that I like:

• Split screen with script/server running and editing. Feels very functional and is a great use of space.

• Unlimited extensions: Magit, Ido, Multi-term, twitter, iBuffer

• Keyboard shortcuts for everything

• The tab key. Emacs really “gets” the tab key. I can tab in the middle of the line and it will correctly tab the beginning of the line, so reformatting is a dream.

• Email, Twitter, RSS, Terminals, etc integrated into one “IDE”

Things I’m trying to get used to or otherwise don’t like:

• Keyboard shortcuts for everything. I want to make sure I’m being productive vs trying to remember as many shortcuts as I can.

• Lack of a beautiful UI

• With infinite customization comes loss of cohesion. I can’t sit at another developer’s desk who uses Emacs and use my shortcuts.

• Why is it so hard to duplicate a line out of the box? In vim I could do “y-y-p”. In Emacs the best I’ve got is C-a C-k C-y C-y, and that’s only if (setq kill-whole-line t) is set. Really?

My last editor change was from vim to Textmate, and though I really miss some vim niceties in Textmate, overall I’ve been fairly happy. I plan to use Emacs for the next few weeks or so, then make a decision at that point.

So, Emacs or VI? Textmate? BBEdit? What’s your favorite editor, and why?