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Hi. I haven't posted in a while but I definately wanted to write about something that seems interesting from my perspective.
That is a post about my personal battle of the editors. If you are a geek and you hear "Battle of the editors" , you will definately say "Oh no , another vi-emacs story". And you will be right. I just wanted to share my experience about this :) I won't start a flame war on this though. It will be just my personal point of view.
When I started writing code I first started writing in MEL. So I just wrote the stuff in the script editor in Maya and that was enough for first time coder. After a week though I realised that this crazy thing can't go on. I tried several different editors. I very much liked SciTE but later switched to the editor I had most experience with - jEdit. What I liked about it was it could be customized like you want it. There are a lot of custom plugins available for it- for example the ones that send your code to maya, the autocomplete MEL and Python modules , etc.
But then one day a colleague came to work in our studio as shader developer. His name was Slavi Kaslev :) Very cool guy and amazingly talanted coder. He was standing next to me and was using the shittiest looking editor I thought then :) - Emacs. It was ugly. No shiny buttons, no icons.. Nothing. Just text editor.
He told me some things about it, and it sparked me.
From Wikipedia: "Emacs is a class of feature-rich text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility.
Development began in the mid-70s and, as of 2008, is still active. Emacs text editors are most popular with technically proficient computer users and computer programmers.
The most popular version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, a part of the Gnu Project, which is commonly referred to simply as "Emacs".
What sparked me most about it was that Slavi could write a lot of code without even touching the mouse.
I hate going for the mouse when you actually want to use just the keyboard. Then I read some more about Emacs, and then one day I just installed it. Slavi gave me his personal files because I couldn't do anything with the default ones. And that's it. I tried to write some code in it. My head exploded. I got nervous. I couldn't write one line of code in that stupid editor. When I needed to actually write fast a code, I got to my old jEdit and just wrote it. Then If i needed to write some simple procedure i went to Emacs again, just to practice, but I was feeling so nervous with his stupid commands that I eventually abandoned it. If i wanted to search for a pattern I had to go to the manual and see how to do it. Then do it. And then the next time I wanted to do it again, I couldn't remember how and had to read that fucking manual again!!! That drove me nuts!!! I stopped using anything but jEdit for about half an year after that experience. It was just too difficult for me to remember all these commands.
Then i started writing in Python. I loved it! I could sketch some code very very fast! Refer to this: http://xkcd.com/353/ And I realised I was actually slowed by the constant jiggling with the mouse in jEdit. I tought that I should try something else. Why not install Vi!!!! And I did it. Wohaa it was so much easier - the commands were so much easier to remember than the C-x M-H C-Watevahkeyisbindedtothesearchfunction!!! I started writing in vi and I enjoyed it. But then some things started to pop out. I hated the constant switching of modes. I just couldn't remember what mode I'm currently in and it started messing me up and slowing me eventually. And then one day I read some post in someone's blog that was explaining how he could memorize all the commands he currently uses in Emacs. He simply said that he doesn't. That's it. You don't need all the commands. The first things you need is just to navigate in it. I went to Emacs and was blown by the fact that after a six or more months I could navigate in it easily. I started writing in it again and I wasn't so nervous now. I could navigate and write. That's actually all you need first. Then I needed something else. I learned how to do it and memorized it. That was the way - when you need a command - you just find how to do it and then do it. Then by doing it constantly you memorize it and as time passes you feel comfortable with all the commands that looked so freakingly scary at the beginning. Now I use Emacs again. And I love it. End of story. See :D ? No flame wars :P
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