One month with Emacs and counting - Part 1

other posts in the from Vim to Emacs series: part 2

Straight to the point: since mid September I've been using Emacs, trying to evaluate whether I was willing to switch from Vim to it.

Yup, that's true, me (user of Vim since the day I've started using GNU/Linux 10 years ago, (not so) active maintainer in Debian of vim and related packages, author of some popular Vim extensions and of vim-addon-manager ) it's considering switching to Emacs. What is worse is that I've de facto already switched. May jamessan forgive me.

OK, that was the hardest part to write, now ...

This choice will have an impact on me: partly because I'm quite sure several fellow DDs will start making fun of this story , and partly because as many geeks I've always had strong opinions on the editor war. Switching side ain't easy.

Hence, I've decided to write a small (2-3) series of blog posts on the issue, to future memory. The post you are reading is about why, since a few months ago, I wasn't willing to give Emacs a try, and how I've changed my mind.

Why I wasn't willing to give Emacs a try, but then changed my mind

I love knowing tools which can improve my workflow, no matter the task. Editors happen to be at the intersection of many tasks, hence knowing well his own editor and feeling satisfied about it is quite important. This is even more so for free software hackers which, for a reason or another, happen to use the very same editor for a lot of different tasks; in my case: programming, conf file hacking (i.e., playing the sysadm role), mail writing, and everything in between.

I've started using vi on Solaris around 1998, then switched to Vim starting from version 4.0, and then followed all its releases up to 7.0. I consider my "Vim karma" to be quite hight and I've delivered several talks about using Vim for LUGs and other free software-related events. Still, I've always been hit bit several minor nuisances and glitches of Vim which couldn't be fixed by simple configuration tuning or add-on implementations (more on this in a future post).

In the quest for the perfect workflow, those glitches have made me try several times other editors hoping for more satisfying work environments. Of course Emacs was one of them, which I've tried repeatedly during the years; the last time was circa 2006.

For one reason or another, after a few days of experiments, I've always decided to give up with it. Why? Various reasons, listed below, together with an explanation of what (I think) has changed since then.