The attempt by one programmer to turn-coat and see the war from the opposing side started with, Seeking Enlightenment in a Holy War.
One week in…
This hasn’t been the greatest idea I’ve ever had. My brain is cross-firing. It’s like the left is trying to talk to the right and I don’t know which one is emacs or vim. Sometimes I reach for vim keys and sometimes I reach for emacs keys. Emacs is starting to take precendence as I find myself hesitating in vim or accidentally hitting emacs sequences. I must be going insane.
It’s still hard to tell which is the more preferrable editor. It was a long time ago when I started learning vim. I like to think that it only took me an hour or so to go through the tutorial and about a week to start working rather effectively with it. Emacs on the other hand, is a twisty maze. The tutorial is long and I still haven’t found all the command analogs I’m used to. I end up resorting to moving the pointer around one character at a time and I haven’t picked up on any real editing shortcuts (save the odd clumsy one I’m sure I invented by accident). Vim is starting to call back to me, but I feel I haven’t really scratched the surface of emacs yet.
Therefore, I must stay with emacs another week. I like that I can write and post my blog posts from within it, check my mail and newsgroups, code, run an interpreter, shell, and double-check documentation all within a single interface. It seems almost anti-unix, but from a certain perspective it is somewhat minimalist. I just hope my good old grep, sed, awk, find, cat, less, wc, and other shell programs know that I still love them.
The battle rages on. See you again soon.