Re:Everyone's first Vi session
by abstractbill on Friday January 18, 2008 @12:10AM
(#100171)
I feel the same way about emacs. A few nights back I was editing my wife's website - making quite a lot of use of keyboard macros, regex search-and-replace, and that kind of thing. She's only ever used MS-Word so she was continuously asking me "how do you do that?"
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After years of Visual Studio I forced myself to learn vim and it wasn't so hard. By "learned" I mean crossing a line where my productivity is on par or better than Visual Studio used to be.
Emacs, however, is nowhere as easy. I am trying to repeat my vim experience by forcing myself to use emacs (part of my CL adventure) and I feel like I need a third hand to hold Ctrl or Alt all the time... Even vim-style navigation without arrows calls for constantly pressed Ctrl.
Not trying to start a war, just sharing my experience. After all it was other peoples "vim tales" that inspired me in the first place.
I wish the emacs macro system was easily Turing complete, but that must open a can of worms or something. I like the notion of writing a program as I do an action, but the macros don't really have control structures built in.