Emacs

Makes

All

Computing

Simple

I remember using the TECO-based Emacs back in the ArcMac in the early 80's. I've only managed to carry my .emacs around with me for the last 11 years; I'd have had a version of it longer if I had access to a 9-track tape unit during that fateful job change...

Does that mean vi won then?

The core of Emacs is a Lisp interpreter coded in C. All significant editing code in Emacs is written in Lisp. Obviously Phil Manchester has never used Emacs beyond saying "where's the Quit button?".

Back in the day, I used Borland's IDEs for C++, Pascal (now Delphi) and Java. If I were still programming for Windows, I might still. But, as a web developer, I will swear and affirm Emacs to be the most productive editor/environment to work in. There are other editors that may seem to do some things easier, but they somehow come up short at one point or another.

Bunch of philistines - lets hear it for nedit !!!!!

I use Emacs every day. Not just to develop code but to write my diary, edit web pages (including a local wiki complete with RSS (thank you John Wiegley and Hugo Haas )), move, rename, files, view tar, zip, archives, view web pages. And those are just the things I do. I am well aware that that is just scratching the surface.

And by the way I do all those things in both MS XP and Ubuntu Linux. I also use VS 2008 (only on XP of course) and the suggestion that it is a reliable product is just beyond belief, it crashes on me at least once a day. If I only had a VB.NET mode for Emacs I would be very happy!

The first editor I used was Teco on DEC PDP-11 in 1983. When I used Unix in 1989 I used vi which was hardly an improvement, and frankly I was a bit scared of the fanatics who used emacs and stayed away from it.

Nowadays if I want to be reminded of those hideous days before WYSIWYG I just open a DOS command window and use Edlin, yes it's still there even in Windows XP.

Of course real programmers just use COPY CON:

It will be very interesting to see what the future of the "Emacs Twins" will be with Stallman taking a more backseat role. Years ago, there was one Emacs (and a few other clones like Temacs and JOVE). Then, almost a decade ago it seems, there was the split (as much philosophical as functional) that led to two main branches - GNU Emacs and XEmacs. Will this change to the leadership of GNU Emacs mean the two might slowly come back together? (Not that either is very different from the other -- its more like red raspberries vs. black raspberries.)

BTW, I learned Emacs essentially 23 years ago, and I still use it daily. I tried many other things, including Visual Studio, Eclipse, Codewrite, and others, but nothing beats the simple down to earth functionality that Emacs has. True, the learning curve can be steep (although XEmacs has a much gentler curve), but the payback is huge.

Perhaps the biggest endorsement for Emacs is that so many editors have a emacs key emulation mode! (But then again, Emacs has a VI key emulation mode.....)

Emacs - it's not just an editor; it's a religion.

(Emacs = Eighty Megs And Continually Swapping)

Microsoft had to decided to get involved before EMACS could be recognised as important? Gimme a break :)