So tell me why anyone should invest time in an editor like emacs unless they already have the the decades of legacy of rewiring their brain to work with a single editor specifically? Same goes for vim. Honestly, there are much better, more flexible and extensible editors out there nowadays, like Sublime Text.
I'm of the opinion that most people are better off becoming familiar with as many tools as possible so they can make better choices regarding what is best suited for a given task.
I picked up vim my first year of grad school and still use it regularly when I need to make a minor edit to a file but can't get away with just doing a quick Perl substitution.
That doesn't mean you should learn anything in particular, but it certainly doesn't take decades and it never hurts to have more options.
Personally, I've used both emacs and vim in remote sessions for quick edits for decades, but that hasn't been enough to learn more than the basics of them. Meanwhile, I've done a couple of decades the BBEdit -> TextMate -> Sublime Text route, which has allowed me to transfer the skills to the next editor and focus more on code itself without mental context switches regarding text editing between the editor and the rest of the system. For remote editing, I've been using rmate since textmate, or nano for the random config file and such edits even locally.
5 comments
1 u/jammi 08 Apr 2015 20:05
So tell me why anyone should invest time in an editor like emacs unless they already have the the decades of legacy of rewiring their brain to work with a single editor specifically? Same goes for vim. Honestly, there are much better, more flexible and extensible editors out there nowadays, like Sublime Text.
1 u/frame11 08 Apr 2015 21:16
I'm of the opinion that most people are better off becoming familiar with as many tools as possible so they can make better choices regarding what is best suited for a given task.
I picked up vim my first year of grad school and still use it regularly when I need to make a minor edit to a file but can't get away with just doing a quick Perl substitution.
That doesn't mean you should learn anything in particular, but it certainly doesn't take decades and it never hurts to have more options.
1 u/jammi 08 Apr 2015 22:00
Personally, I've used both emacs and vim in remote sessions for quick edits for decades, but that hasn't been enough to learn more than the basics of them. Meanwhile, I've done a couple of decades the BBEdit -> TextMate -> Sublime Text route, which has allowed me to transfer the skills to the next editor and focus more on code itself without mental context switches regarding text editing between the editor and the rest of the system. For remote editing, I've been using rmate since textmate, or nano for the random config file and such edits even locally.