February 20, 2010 22:23
Posted by Jeremy Durham
Emacs: The First Week
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?
2 Comments
March 8, 2010
Since you asked:
Having not had a Mac as my primary machine, I seldom get to use Textmate. I do a lot of terminal work, so I prefer vi – vim actually. I like the customization options, and when it is setup right, you can fly. Cohesion between vi installations is a problem the same as emacs. Since it is also a terminal based app, it also lacks a “beautiful UI”.
I will have to look into emacs to see what it offers. In the meantime, I have been working with Rubymine. It is quite a large IDE, and certainly a turn off for someone coming from something as simplistic as Textmate, vim, or emacs, however it can be very convenient. Like many IDEs, it excels at refactoring Ruby code, running continuous tests, watching your sever logs, version control integration, running rake tasks, and reading inline documentation, along with code complete, and live templates. To get you started, you can even configure Rubymine to use key bindinds from Textmate!
March 12, 2010
Ben,
Forgive me for not mentioning Rubymine! I only fiddled with it when it came out, but it looked pretty impressive. I’m not sure I could go back to the world of full fledged IDEs, but I’ve been hearing abour more and more people using Rubymine.
I should really pull down Rubymine and take another look; thanks for the pointer!
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