Emacs vs. Eclipse vs. Vim

[Duncan Booth]

Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:

> Clay Hobbs <clay at lakeserv.net> wrote:
>> The first real text editor I used was Vim, which I actually started
>> using about a year ago.  I've looked at Emacs and it just looks
>> confusing.
> 
> I've been using emacs for so many years (um let's see, it's got to be
> close to 25 years now; first saw it on Columbia's TOPS-20 systems in
> the early 80's) that my fingers know what they're doing without my
> even thinking about it.  In fact, I used to work with another emacs
> nut.  Every so often, one of use would watch the other do something
> and ask, "What was that?".  Inevitably, neither of us could evoke the
> keystrokes we had just typed.  We would just re-do it, and watch our
> fingers to see what we typed.  It didn't even have to be on a
> keyboard; we could air-type it, and that was good enough.
> 
I also started using Emacs about 25 years ago, but then when I moved to 
using DOS machines which at the time weren't capable of running Emacs I 
suffered withdrawal symptoms until I found Epsilon (http://lugaru.com) 
which started life as an Emacs style editor on DOS.

I still use Epsilon today, even when I'm using Linux: it isn't free 
software in any sense of the word, but I find that a lot of the things I 
use it for it actually does better than Emacs. If you are willing to 
consider paying for an editor then download the evaluation copy of Epsilon 
and give it a go.

-- 
Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com