(15-09-2012, 06:16 PM)NeoTerra Wrote:

(15-09-2012, 03:15 AM)purgatori Wrote: I used to use Vim for all my text-editing needs, but now I use Emacs for that and... well, just about everything else.

How do you like emacs?

Well, the learning curve being as steep as it is -- especially when one is coming from the radically different Vim and/or doesn't even know how to utilize the various help functions -- I like it a lot more now that I'm a the "intermediate" stage of the journey towards Emacs mastery. For a long time, I actually used the "Vimpulse" library so I could actually get right into using it for all the things I previously used Vim for, without having to learning a multitude of key-chords. From those lazy beginnings, though, I slowly eased my way into using Emacs as Emacs, and now I'm at the stage where I'm learning and using Emacs Lisp to dive into the guts of Emacs (nicely exposed to the user as they all are) and alter it to serve my purposes even better.

I think that what I like about it most though is just how extendable it is. Right now, I regularly use EMMS (Emacs Multimedia System) to manage and play my music collection; Org to and Diary to compose and publish blog posts, organize various types of todo lists, and keep track my schedule; Dired for file-management; Emacs-w3m for browsing the web; R-mode for interfacing with the interactive evaluation environment for R, etc. etc. The advantage in using Emacs (in conjunction with lots of external apps that it would be foolish and inefficient to attempt to rewrite, e.g: LaTeX, R, mplayer, imagemagick, etc.) for all these tasks is, for me, that they adhere to the Emacs way of doing things, so that learning how to use a new library, and getting it to work with the rest of the libraries in your work-flow, rarely involves much hassle. Plus, they're all written in Emacs Lisp, so it's easy to alter their functionality -- even on the fly, if need be.