Sacha Chua has her latest Emacs chat up. This time it’s with Mickey Petersen proprietor of the excellent Mastering Emacs. If you follow the Emacs scene at all, you will be familiar with Mickey and his definitive articles on the ins and outs of Emacs.
Mickey came to Emacs pretty much because he was told all the cool kids use Vim. In the intervening 10 years he’s worked to master Emacs and share his knowledge with the rest of us through his blog. Watching him use Emacs you can see that mastery in action. He navigates through files so quickly and easily that it’s hard to follow the action.
One of the things that impressed and inspired me was that he tends to think in term of language constructs rather than characters. Thus, for example, he navigates by and manipulates s-expressions. That’s an attitude that I want to cultivate; it can’t help but increase my editing speed and efficiency.
The chat is about 53 and a half minutes so plan accordingly. As with all of Chua’s chats, you’re sure to learn a few things. For example, I learned the efficient way to backwards kill an s-expression.
Update: Sacha has a transcript of the chat up.