text editor suggestion?

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2006 02:06:15 -0400, John Salerno <johnjsal at NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote:
>
>> The two big names in text editing, Vim and Emacs, will both meet these
>> criteria easily. They also have the advantage that you'll find one or
>> the other, or both, on just about any Unix system intended for use by
>> a programmer.

And they're installable on Windows, and they will be ported to anything
you're likely to encounter, for the rest of your life.

>> There is also an enormous amount of support for both these editors,
>> for all manner of text editing tasks, available online. It's a good
>> idea to learn at least one of them very well, rather than learn a
>> bunch of less-popular editors for specific tasks.

That's an important point, IMHO. At least if you're living in Unix, plain
old text editing is one of the most common tasks you do, and you rarely end
up in situations where you're forced to use domain-specific editors (except
when using web applications, where you are often limited to the text editing
facilities of your web browser).

I usually don't like the idea of becoming addicted to one simgle program,
but I make an exception for text editing. I'm so much more productive in
emacs than anywhere else, and the things I learn while (say) programming in
Python translate directly to writing documentation, writing C code, or
massaging and browsing large data sets.

> I'd really like to learn vim, but I spent days just trying to figure out 
> how to get the syntax highlighting and indentation working, where these 
> settings are and how to edit them, and it still doesn't work for me.

That's to be expected, and to be honest, you'd have the same problem with
the editor I'd suggest, emacs.

I've accepted that there are huge areas of emacs that I don't know and which
would be useful to me if I had known them. It took almost ten years to
discover dabbrev-expand, and I only found out about open-rectangle last
week.

And noone can tell me /which/ features I'm missing, because everyone uses
their editor in a different way.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@        Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
\X/     snipabacken.dyndns.org>  R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!