21 Jul
2025
21 Jul
'25
2:12 p.m.
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 09:59:54AM -0400, Chet Ramey via COFF wrote:
On 7/20/25 9:52 AM, Will Senn wrote:
So many smart people I know love emacs. I forced myself to live in it
for a year, not the emacs vi mode stuff, just straigth emacs.
I never got to the point that I liked it. I think it's the lisp aspect,
if you don't love lisp, I don't think you'll love emacs.
vi just works for me. And when I tried to get my kid to try emacs,
his comment was "I've watched you in vi, it's magic, I want that".
I do some simple stuff, here are the maps I use a lot:
# :.,$
, !}fmt<CR>
@ :1,.
So I can be on a paragraph and hit "," and it is reformatted to fit
in 80 columns. I can be anywhere and do "#d" and that deletes to the
bottom, same thing "@d" and that deletes to the top. Apparently that is
"magic" :-)
As a vi guy, I cannot even understand emac's
appeal. I've tried countless
times, even going emacs only for a while... when I went back to vi, it was
like old shoes, very comfortable.
Because familiarity is very powerful. Lots of people mistake it for
intuitiveness.