Emacs!

I am an avid fan of emacs! I have been using emacs for the last half a dozen years still, i think, 90% of emacs still reamains unexplored. Emacs is almost as old as i am! No wonder it is reportedly the second oldest software repository in the whole world!
Emacs is just too much to be called an 'editor', since almost everything (coding, running the code, debugging, code-browsing, scripting, reading mails, web browsing, playing music (with playlists n all), working with files on remote machines transparently, filesystem browsing, version control, ascii art drawing, planning using the calendar, diffing, playing games, reading RSS feeds, viewing man pages etc etc) can be done inside emacs. And since, emacs includes a full-fledged interpreter inside it, you can virtually write anything you want in emacs' own language - elisp.

An emacs fan had put it this way - 'Emacs is my operating system, and Linux its device driver'.
Another had said - 'The purpose of a windowing system is to put some amusing fluff around your one almighty emacs window.'

Emacs is (in)famous for its lengthy, difficult to remember keyboard 'short'-cuts. My project mates used to jab me whenever i used emacs during our college project. They used to say - 'its not long before emacs will require people to use their toes too for pressing keyboard shortcuts'. I used to continue my emacs session, unaffected ;)

For those from the vi camp who have never tasted emacs, i would like to point to Vimacs to begin with.

Wikipedia has a nice entry on the holy war of Emacs vs Vi - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

xkcd has this beautiful one on emacs -
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png

Related Content