[osflash] [OT] one editor for everything (emacs)

[Mark Winterhalder]

On 1/5/07, Yidong Fang <fangyidong at gmail.com> wrote:
> I keep deleting mails these days because of the 'emacs war'  :-)
>
> Many people said 'real hacker uses emacs'.
> I'd like to be a real hacker,so I tried emacs many times. But I end up using
> eclipse after I forget the emacs commands for times. So I'm not a real
> hacker yet.

I think that's an important point for the GUI vs text-based
discussion. GUIs have a lower threshold users have to take to get to
work. Learning keyboard shortcuts takes time, but users want immediate
results.
Eclipse has a good number of keyboard shortcuts itself, but I don't
need to know them, I can always rely on the GUI. That's a two edged
sword, of course, because as a result I know hardly any of them and
click my way through far too often.
I don't think there is so much of a difference in productivity between
Eclipse and Emacs for somebody who knows most of keyboard commands, so
I will stick with Eclipse for now (and learn some more short cuts),
but I'd still like to know how long it took the Emacs users until the
commands they use daily became natural. Maybe I'll force myself
through the process with a pet project one day.

Mark