Ayrat Badykov has a short post on Why Emacs is a great text editor. The post is really about why he switched to Emacs and why he’s sticking with it. Although you won’t find anything in the post to convince a n00b, there are a couple of interesting points worth commenting on.
First, Badykov says that he was convinced to move from Sublime to Emacs when he pair programmed with a Vim user. He was, he says, blown away by how much more productive the Vim user was in his editing compared to his. The Vim user never used the touch pad; he did everything with shortcuts and had shortcuts for everything. He chose Emacs instead of Vim because Emacs was “popular” in his community and there were lots of videos and blogs about using it.
This really resonated with me. Most of you know that I’m strictly laissez-faire about what editor people use. It’s not that I don’t have strong feelings about the matter, it’s just that I wouldn’t think of imposing my views on others. I’m happy to let people use whatever editor they find is best for them. All that said, I have to admit to a bit of annoyance when people who have never used Emacs or Vim or, in fact, have never used any editor other then some menu/mouse driven abomination complain that Emacs/Vim are “old technology” and don’t look as nice as whatever it is they’re using. Badykov provides the perfect rejoinder: those Emacs/Vim users with their old editors are much more efficient than you are. They save a second or two on each operation and that can add up to hours a day. Whether or not Emacs/Vim users can actually save hours every day, there’s no doubt that we are a lot more efficient.
The second thing I found interesting about the post is that under “disadvantages of Emacs,” Badykov notes that there’s a steep learning curve and that it might take you a couple of weeks to become proficient with it. I’m as much in favor of instant gratification as the next guy but it would never occur to me that I could install Emacs and instantly become proficient. After 10 years I’m still learning and it’s not unusual for me to think, “How did I not know that?” after learning some new feature or trick.
Like anything else worthwhile, Emacs requires a commitment to become even reasonably adept at its use. If you aren’t prepared to make that commitment, there’s always nano or whatever mouse/driven editor you’re using now. Just don’t expect to be as efficient as those of us using those “outdated editors.”
Harking back to my old post on Using Emacs, I expect that Badykov is or is going to become a first rate developer. Not because he uses Emacs but because he cares about his tools and is willing to put in the effort to master them.
Update : Batsov → Badykov