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I haven't found that Emacs has made it harder to use other editors. It's just made me realize how horrible it's always been to use them, hammering away at the arrow keys, using the mouse way more often than should be necessary, spending time on fixing whitespace that should be spent writing code…

Then there's the fact that Emacs really isn't an editor. If anything, it's a shell that runs elisp programs, chief among which is a text editor. Programs like magit and ansi-term (and gnus and compile and dired and TRAMP and…) are good examples of this.



That's similar to what I joke about it being when people complain about it being bloated: It's a LISP VM, which happens to have a thriving ecosystem of utilities that run on it.

Germane to the conversation that emacs make you "good at other editors" (nb: Are other editors as programmable/versatile as Emacs and vi -- certainly edtiors need to be able to rise to a level required by the operator... I haven't worked w/ textmate or sublime, etc., etc.) -- I've recently shelved Emacs for vi to "level-up" my vi skills. I'm as I delve into vi, I'm finding facilities that I really hadn't imagined in my previous episodes w/ vi, and I think part of it can be attributed to my years w/ Emacs, and the attitude that it instilled: "There has to be a way to do what I'm imagining".


I say it's a dynamic Lisp environment with a UI based on textual buffers. Compare it with Squeak, for example.




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