October 22, 2006 — jao

Just to illustrate what i meant the other day when i exhorted you to pick a powerful enough editor, and, most importantly, learn how to use it, i think this Emacs Screencast is quite adequate. It’s made by a Ruby coder, but note that Emacs plays these kind of tricks (and many more) for virtually any language out there.

The point is, if your environment is not powerful enough to make this kind of things, you should be looking for something better. The keyword here is extensibility. If your environment is not able to automate a task, you should be able to extend it; and the best way i can imagine is having a full featured lisp at my disposal when i need to write an extension (here is the list of Emacs extensions used in the screencast, by the way). Phil Windley has also made a similar point recently, in his When you pick your tools, pick those that can build tools mini-article.

And of course, when your editor and your dynamic language conspire to provide an integrated environment, you’ve reached nirvana: that’s the case of Common Lisp and Slime, as shown in other widely known videos.

As said, the message is not that you should use Emacs, but that you should use the right tool. For instance, PLT Scheme users have other alternatives, like DrScheme, which can also be easily extended, as beautifully demonstrated by DivaScheme, an alternative set of key-bindings for DrScheme that you can see in action below:

You see, as programmers, we’re lucky: we can build our tools and make they work exactly the way we want. If your environment precludes your doing so in any way, something’s wrong with it, no matter how much eye-candy it uses to hide its deficiencies. (Yes, i have some examples in mind ;-) .)

Update: Phil has just posted an interesting follow-up to his tools article. His closing words nicely summarise what this post of mine is all about:

Note that I’m not writing all this to convert the dedicated vi users or anyone else. If you’ve got something that works for you, then good enough. But if you’re searching for a editor that’s programmable with plenty of headroom, then give emacs a try. There’s a steep learning curve, but the view is great from the top (or even half way up)!

Exactly!