Today I installed Leopard on my home laptop. As usual, installing a new version of the OS broke the Xemacs build I keep around for the one thing I do with Emacs. Normally I have the fortitude to get it working again, but not tonight. In a final step away from the brain damage of Emacs as a tool to use every day, I deleted the install and will not bring it back. It turns out that for what I needed to do, I don’t really need to carry Emacs around with me anyway. So it’s gone.
Note: yes I know that there is a built-in version of GNU Emacs in Leopard. For reasons that are too painful and stupid to go into, it really isn’t usable for this particular application.
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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.
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?
Haha, you were addicted to zephyr.
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.
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.
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.
I miss the kill ring once in a while. But not enough to deal with all the other brain damage.
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.