Is it worth investing time in learning to use Emac

Question

Right up front: I do not want to start a religious war.

I've used vi for as long as I can remember, and the few times I've tried to pick up Emacs I've been so lost that I've quickly given up. Lots of people find Emacs very powerful, however. Its programmability is somewhat legendary. I'm primarily doing Solaris+Java development, and I'd like to ask a simple question: will my productivity increase if I invest time in getting my head around Emacs? Is the functionality that it offers over Vim going to be paid back in productivity increases in a reasonable timeframe?

Repeat: I don't want a "my editor is better than yours" answer. I just want a yes or no answer as to whether it's worth investing the time or not. Will my productivity really increase?

Answer 1

Along the same line of not looking for a religious war (but go ahead and downvote me if you feel you must), why do you feel that the only option to vi is emacs? Is it the OS you develop on, or just the options you explored?

The Java development landscape enjoys some of the best IDEs these days (both free and paid for), if not the best when it comes to code editing and refactoring support.IntelliJ IDEA even has a vi plugin that can help you feel more at home, for instance (not sure if something similar is available for Eclipse). While changing tools does imply a learning curve, the time spent doing it might be worth it if the leap is big enough.

Answer 2

Since vi/Vim and Emacs are pretty close in terms of what they can or cannot do, productivity with these two editors comes from experience in using it.

In my opinion, being a programmer it won't take you long to get the general idea about Emacs once you start using it. Others can only say so much, you got to try it out for yourself to know it.

As for me, I use both. It's like taking more than one weapon to a war, use the right one in the right circumstances. ;)

Answer 3

Disclaimer: I'm ignorant. I've been an emacs user for about 4 years, and vim user for about 6 months, maybe more like 15 if you count all the times I've tried to learn it and hated it. (The writing vs moving mode distinction kills me. Every time. So if it doesn't kill you then my opinion might be completely worthless.) That said, I think my opinion is actually interestingly different from the 26 others that I've seen on here, so I'm going to voice it. :Disclamer

My opinion:

• Emacs is better for typing, especially large-scale "I'm writing a new feature and it will be a while before I even try to see if it runs".
• Vim is better for editing, especially quick edits.

When I need to understand and hack in 8 files simultaneously, Emacs' properties as a tiling window manager with multi-buffer (buffers have a 1.2:1 correspondence to files, they're often the same thing, but aren't necessarily) regexp-search (and replace) are incredible.

If I don't like some small thing because of git diff in the shell (I don't use emacs' VC features very often, although when I do I love them) I open it with vim and get the hell out faster than I could hit Alt-TAB.

The fact that Emacs' editing commands are more readily available while typing make typing much faster than it is in Vim. Ctrl+a is much faster than ESC ^ i, and you don't have the cognitive load of "do I want a or i or o or O..." which, god, I hate thinking about. And same for all the other movement commands commands.

I type faster, much faster, in Emacs. That means things like Org Mode (which I use for everything: TODO lists, bug tracking, notes, long emails, documentation...) make more sense (to me) in Emacs than they would in Vim.

And, Elisp is incredible, even though it sucks. It totally makes up for Emacs' broken regular expressions: you can use the full power of emacs everywhere, including in a multi-file regexp-replacement. And in text snippets.

Answer 4

I prefer emacs to vi, but I'm comfortable in both.

There are some things that you can do in emacs that make it more powerful than vi, but not all of them are even programming-related. (Can you send email or read news from within vi? No, but who cares?) If you're comfortable with lisp (I'm not), you might be able to write add-ons and modes and stuff to make your life easier, but that's just likely to be syntax colouring and brace matching and eye candy like that.

I will stop rambling now. Will your productivity increase using emacs? No.

Update: See my comment below. Since I posted this, I have come across ways that using emacs has made me more productive than using vi.

Answer 5

I want to look into emacs further, but I just can't use it for long stretches of time; it hurts my hands. Am I doing something horribly wrong?

Answer 6

Will my productivity really increase?

For the first few days/weeks, absolutely not.

After you stop having to read through the tutorial every time you want to edit something - sure..

Emacs is more "powerful" than vim, it's scripting engine is far more flexible, and there are far more scripts, modes and the likes built around emacs.

That said, the opposite is true.. If you spent the same amount of time improving your knowledge of vim, you'd could be just as productive..

Maybe not productive in the same way - I'd say vim is quicker for editing files, emacs is better at doing everything else (again, I would personally say things like flymake-mode, VCS bindings are such are quicker to use than the vim equivalent)