January 30, 2011

Poking at Emacs

I've been a vim vim fan for a while now and with some recent configs I'm starting to feel pretty confident and happy with it. For those who don't know it's basically a text editor, like notepad, but with a lot of keycommands which allows you to edit code (and text in general) faster. For writing a simple straight up text it might not be worth it, the learning curve is pretty steep, but for someone who codes a lot it's really good in the long run. Here's an article I read when I read when I started with vim.

The thing is that I need to work at school too and everyone there use emacs. Emacs is in many ways similar to vim, but they're a bit like bitter competitors and if you're a vim user, like me, then you're not an emacs user and vice versa. Also I haven't gotten vim to work as I want to at school, meaning it doesn't work exactly like I'm used to (I'm quite picky with that). So what I've done up until now is that I've been working from home and trying to avoid emacs as much as humanly possible.

It's been working okay so far, but I don't think it will for much longer. When we're declaring our labs our teachers use emacs, when I need to collaborate with other students then they most likely will be using emacs and when we have our exam. It was pretty ridiculous yesterday when we had to show our lab and I got really, really nervous on how to open multiple files in emacs... It feels like something I should be able to do in my sleep and if there's anything like a nerd ranking somewhere I think I just hit rock bottom.

No this shouldn't be allowed to continue so now I'm going to give emacs a try. I doubt that it'll replace vim but still I think it's quite nice. In theory it should be just as nice as vim, with really fast code editing once you get used to it. Here's a better comparison of the two. I guess I just don't like the idea of having to climb another intimidating learning curve.