A couple of days ago I came across this quote: "Perl by itself is an OK OS, but it lacks a lightweight scripting language". I was immediately reminded of something else I'd read about Emacs, something to the effect that Emacs was a decent OS (or maybe shell) but lacked a good editor. Now, before I start a flame war, I'll admit that Emacs is indeed a stonkingly powerful editor. The other major hacker's editor, Vim (a modern, more usable version of vi), is also programmable, but not nearly to the same extent that Emacs is - not to mention that Emacs Lisp is infinitely better documented than Vim's scripting language. There are lots of add-on modules to Emacs written by people who want it to do something it couldn't do before, and it's easy to change its behaviour if you want. So before I learned to use Vim (currently the editor I use for literally all editing tasks), I had a go at learning Emacs. But I could never get used to the strange choices for navigation keys (up, down, left and right are (using Emacs notation) C-p, C-n, C-b and C-f respectively, which are allegedly mnemonic, at least to English speakers, but certainly not ergonomic) or the fact that you have to stretch your pinkie to get to the Ctrl key to use them (this reliance on shift keys being the source of one of the jocular expansions of EMACS: "Esc Meta Alt Ctrl Shift"). When I got round to learning to use Vim, I found that using Vim was simply much more comfortable - up, down, left and right are k, j, h and l respectively, all on the home row (assuming a qwerty-ish keyboard - mine was UK qwerty at the time, now a German qwertz) and unshifted. Read the rest of this entry »