Comments on: A Small Milestone

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:37:46 +0000

I love being able to make separate panes with keystrokes rather than mouse clicks too. I haven’t discovered this in other editors though I haven’t tried. Basically, any movement I don’t have to go to the mouse for is good.

My deranged keyboard also helps. It is a kinesis advantage dished dvorak split keyboard. It puts ctrl and alt on the thumbs which removed the strain of making all those funky ctrl- and alt- commands. I think emacs would cripple my hands on a regular keyboard.

By: psu

psu — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:25:19 +0000

I miss the kill ring once in a while. But not enough to deal with all the other brain damage.

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:14:43 +0000

The kill ring is probably what I would hate to lose the most. I like the chording key bindings and never having to touch my mouse but the kill ring is king!

Vi made my head spin and fall off the first few times I tried it and I was never forced to use it so I can’t.

By: psu

psu — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:25:26 +0000

For most of the work I do I use the editor that’s in Xcode. it’s not as good as the old emacs C-mode in a lot of ways (the auto-indent always seems to be broken) but it gets the job done and it works better within the environment than using some external editor interface.

For most utility editing I use a combination of Textmate and bbedit. BBEdit is not great, but for basic text editing with font coloring of code it does an OK job, and at least I don’t have to remember the some stupid key sequence to go into “insert” mode. Also, most of the default color schemes are not stupid (unlike any of the colorized Emacsen).

Textmate would be better if they spent less time on useless “modules” and more time making undo work right.

By: peterb

peterb — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:38:18 +0000

As “the other Pete”, I’ve never been able to tolerate BBEdit. I can’t understand why people like it.

I’ve had one foot in Emacs and one foot in vi for the past 20 years. Now that I’m not using Emacs for serious programming projects (I just use Xcode’s built-in editor), most of the time I use vi for my utility work.

In the rare cases when I need a “feature” (eg, editing a little XML), I’ll use TextMate. You can’t use TextMate for everything, though: TextMate is totally great, except for all the things it completely sucks at. If you know what I mean.

By: Jon F

Jon F — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:06:06 +0000

Haha, you were addicted to zephyr.

By: dfm

dfm — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:53:36 +0000

It sounds like you’ve consciously decided to make a clean break from the Emacs family of editors; if that’s the case, you probably don’t care that there’s a Cocoa-ified port of Emacs.

Personally, I think it’s rather nice: it manages to look and feel more than slightly Mac-native while at the same time preserving the essential… uh, “Emacsiness” of the thing. When you survey the results of some other attempts to reform Emacs into a well-behaved, first-class citizen of Mac OS X, you realize that this is no mean feat at all.

What are you using instead of Emacs? BBEdit? TextMate?

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:52:58 +0000

I love my console version of emacs for programming. I hate using some IDE’s editor. I feel so comfortable in it. But I tried using it for everything once and it turned out that I didn’t do everything else the way I was “supposed” to. I didn’t get my mail through a unix mailbox on my pc, I get it from google and like their interface. Calendars, diaries, mp3 players, chat. It all works somewhere else better. I wish I could make firefox understand emacs keybindings without doing any work but clearly it isn’t important because I haven’t done it.

But please don’t make me delete my emacs.

And please don’t make me use the graphical interface, what’s the point then?

Just curious, what is your one application? Mine is programming TI DSPs at the moment.