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[Steven D'Aprano]

Christian Gollwitzer wrote:

> Am 23.08.14 11:08, schrieb Steven D'Aprano:
>> This is the moment that I decide to give up on Emacs and take up
>> something trivial in comparison, like being a Soyuz pilot, если вы
>> знаете, что я имею в виду.
> 
> Well done, Steve! This is the exact reason that I do not recommend gvim
> to anybody, who asks me an editor question, though I use it myself for
> practically any text editing task.  (I'm pretty sure you did that C-f
> ... thing on purpose to make your point clear. and that you actually
> understand it was meant to represent pressing Ctrl-key).

Of course I did, but only because I've been a Linux user and programmer for
about 15 years now. Except for Emacs, the rest of the world says Ctrl-F (or
Command-F if you have a Mac), and use it to mean Find. Emacs is a universe
of its own, but you can hardly be a Linux programmer without coming across
Emacs terminology enough to at least recognise it.


> There are ways to put these editors into Beginner's mode, for vim there
> is "evim", and for sure emacs has something similar, where the editor
> behaves more like you expect. In evim, this means you can't go to
> command mode, and you need to use the menus and toolbars to save/load
> text. But if you do that, you also loose the functionality that comes
> from the command mode - it's actually better to recommend Notepad++ or
> kate.

Despite my comments, I don't actually have any objection to people who
choose to use Emacs, or Vim, or edit their text files by poking the hard
drive platter with a magnetised needle if they prefer :-) But I do think
it's silly of them to claim that Emacs has no learning curve, or to fail to
recognise how unfamiliar and different the UIs are compared to nearly
everything else a computer user is likely to be familiar with in 2014.

I'm especially annoyed and/or amused by the tendency of many people to
assume that there are only three editors: Emacs, Vim (one of which is used
by all right-thinking people, the other being sent by the Devil to tempt us
from righteousness) and Notepad (which is used only by the most primitive,
deprived savages who are barely capable of bashing out "Hello World" using
one finger). Besides, ed is the one true editor *wink*

My own feeling is that Emacs and/or Vim very likely are extraordinarily
powerful, and for those who want to take the time and effort to become
proficient they can probably solve certain editing tasks more quickly than
I can. But that's okay: I suspect that they're optimizing for the wrong
things, or at least things for which I personally have no interest in
optimizing: while they can probably replace the third letter of every
second word in all sentences beginning with W ten times faster than I can,
that's hardly a bottleneck in my world. I've watched touch-typing Vim
users, and they can pound the keys much faster than me, but that seems to
mean that they just make mistakes faster than me. (Possibly unfair, since
everyone probably loses accuracy when being watched. But still, it's the
only data I have.)

When I'm programming, actual fingers on keys is just a small proportion of
the time spent. Most of my time is reading, thinking and planning, with
typing and editing a distant fourth, and I not only don't mind moving off
the keyboard onto the mouse, but actually think that's a good thing to
shift my hands off the keyboard and use a different set of muscles. So I'm
not especially receptive to arguments that Vim or Emacs will make me more
productive.

But, to each their own.



-- 
Steven