Ha! Emacs is a dream compared to vi. I used to poke fun
at this guy I worked with years back who was a vi wizard
with my impression of a vi guru:
"Hey! Check out this slick vi feature for
inserting auto-expanded code blocks using regex pattern
matches! First us all five fingers on your left hand,
three on your right and bash the spacebar with your
nose..."
Thank GOD for progress.
The most powerful aspect of Emacs is that it includes a
Lisp interpreter, which Emacs gurus heavily use to
customize their environment. Key bindings are not so
difficult to learn, really. Once you have used them
1.000.000 times, they come quite naturally :-).
--
David (remembering fondly one of his first love: a
Symbolics 3650, with an Emacs implementation of DWIM (Do
What I Mean), an editor able to guess (sometimes even
correctly) the result intended when bogus input was
provided). See how I like parentheses? :-)
XEmacs on Windows has keyboard bindings for the arrow
keys, etc that work a lot like 'normal' windows
programs. That makes it a lot more tolerable for folks
used to Microsoft style text editing. However, ctrl-key
navigation has the benefit of keeping your fingers over
the home row, where they do most of their work anyway.
It's an efficiency thing.
Emacs also has excellent keyboard macro facilities that
are worth their weight in gold. The only thing that got
me off of Emacs and into Visual Studio are all the
wonderful Intellisense features. Those are a huge win...
Learn it once, use it everywhere.
(Which is a good thing considering the learning
curve...)
Some of our contractors favor VI Like Emacs. The aptly
acronymed VILE.
I've never been able to figure out why he likes it
either. Heretic.
:wq!
lets try to remember emacs was around way before
keyboard had 104+ keys (not counting embedded music
control and msn launcher)
They had to get around the missing keys, (page up,down
etc.) which are still non-standard in most termcap on
unixes.
And sometime you won't even get the arrow keys...
After that whether you're an escape key lover or meta
combo freak is really up to you.
I for one do not find visual studio's keyboard shortcut
any simpler. ctrl-k + ctrl-d anyone ?
Why ctrl-v to paste? x to cut? we're just so used to
those we think of them as standard when they really
aren't.
Emacs keybindings are pretty universal through the UNIX
world. While it may seem esoteric, there are good
historical reasons for it (as was said by an earlier
commenter), and the relative standardization of those
keybindings makes it far less masochistic than one might
think.
The real mindjob is switching back and forth between
Windows programs and UNIX programs. I occaisionally find
myself accidentally printing a document when I meant to
go up to the previous line.
I learned emacs for the first time in 1985. I didn't
feel as if it was difficult to learn, which I suspect
says something about me :-) I stopped using it daily in
1992. I just (a few days ago) started using it again,
and was surprised to see how little I'd forgotten. I
have never figured out vi, despite years of trying to
learn it. I now just bind the editor in my shell to
emacs.