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  • danielxvu
    +2

    Heh, I actually started using Emacs in the last couple of months. (I was born in 1990, so I grew up with Eclipse, Notepad++, Sublime Text, Intellij...) It makes the 4GB Windows machine I have to use at work so much more bearable. No more 50 instances of Explorer open at the same time!

    I find that it's still so much easier to develop Java in Eclipse however; the auto-completion, wizard-generated code and the ability to run the project on a local Tomcat instance with a couple of clicks, for example. But Emacs is quickly taking over any project that involves dynamically typed programming languages or of course extensive tinkering with configuration files.

    • crincon (edited 9 years ago)
      +2

      Haha you know, I started using Emacs in the late 80s (I was born in the 70s). Back then? The main gripe people had, the source of all Emacs jokes? It's soo bloated! Computers struggle to run that monstrosity!

      Things have changed huh :D

      And yes, of course, it's not that Emacs is so magic, but rather, people get used to what we learn to do and we're extremely reluctant to change. And, as you know now, of course, to be proficient in Emacs you not only have to develop spatial memory for all the weird keystrokes, but you need some understanding of Lisp, and a very good grasp of the code you're writing. As you say, no autocompletion or wizards or inline help, so you have to know your code very well, your symbol table is in your head like. And so must be the APIs you're using, and you have to know how to get to the docs on your own, quick. These days, I hardly think it's worth all that effort, learning to keep all that stuff in your head just to write code fast. Me, I did it because we had no option back then.

      I'm pretty sure these days, a skilled young hacker with an IDE codes faster than I do with my Emacs. But it has to be a good one, 'cause I'm damn fast B) Haha.

      Oh and yeah, js3 is magic. Seriously, I've looked, and I'm not aware of any editor that comes close to Emacs for editing Javascript (I mean, not snippets for HTML, but serious modules, for Node and such).