[Python-ideas] Accessible tools

[Andrew Barnert]

On Feb 18, 2015, at 16:50, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Emacs is a paleolithic design which has recently had GUI features
> grafted on to it,

Not exactly recently; it goes back to version 19--as in 1992-ish for Lucid and Epoch, 1994 for GNU. In fact, many people think the reason it's GUI features are so strange is that they were grafted on too long ago, not too recently, meaning they're stuck with a weird paradigm that goes back to the days before the GUI wars.

> but the Emacs maintainers continue to ensure that
> its features work well in a terminal.  I think it would be your best
> bet, because (as a non-VIM user) my guess is that VIM users mostly
> prefer to use VIM as the editor in systems like Eclipse.

An awful lot of people use vim from the console. In fact, one of the reasons they claim it's better than emacs is that it's tiny enough to fit on embedded/mobile systems and starts up quickly enough to use for a quick one-line edit. Another is that its command sequences are designed to be typed without looking at the screen or moving your hands from normal touch-type position. And most of the people I know who like to use vim graphically still have the same anti-IDE mentality you'd expect from people who prefer vi, and use its built-in GUI.

The reason not to use vim is (or, rather, might be) that it doesn't have nearly as many customizations and extensions available, so there may not be any way to configure it the way the OP needs. With emacs, pretty much anything is possible; the only question is whether it's easy enough...