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Convince me to use Emacs as a secondary editor

Name: Anonymous 2013-09-21 13:32

As a vim user, I tried going through the tutorial, and I realized Emacs is a fucking shit editor. The whole Emacs thing (not just the editor) enjoys a lot of popularity, so it must be for a reason. It definitely isn't the keyboard shortcuts, so there must be something else.

org-mode? What's so special about it? What features does it have that make it superior notepad.exe?
Specific programming language modes? There must be something really good that outweighs the C-x x M-x crap.
Does remapping Ctrl to Caps Lock really make a difference? Do you still have to press both keys at the same time, or can you do something like Caps Lock, then x?

I'm mainly interested in C, Lithp, Haskell, TeX and FIOC, so I'd also like to know if there's something damn special in Emacs that's worth using over vim. I plan to use Emacs for the ``powerful'' stuff everyone seems to care about. If eshell or the calculators are good enough, I'm fine with only using those.

Name: Anonymous 2013-09-21 18:10

>>6
Damn, you are easy to troll. But nevertheless, Emacs isn't as good as Vim at manipulating text, but the charm is the flexibility, which has allowed the existence of an enormous amount of plugins like IDO-mode or undo-tree, which can vastly affect how you use the editor.

The thing that makes it "powerful" like Vim is completely different; whereas you edit in Vim using basically a language of text-manipulation actions you can compose, the thing with Emacs is that just about everything is a Lisp object you can use or tweak to make your own, and it isn't even hard. I took some Lisp code off the web to get a nicer directory tree buffer than the default one, and I happened to run into another procedure that allowed you to make a "window" (open file) unswitchable, so that you couldn't switch it on accident or whatever, which for some reason the dirtree mode allowed. I put the two together and I made that little mode a lot more usable.

But I probably wouldn't be using it if it weren't for the Lisp-related modes.

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