Emacs in the era of IDEs

Question

I am relatively new in a software development. I have noticed that in some cases a text editor with extended text processing capabilities (I use Notepad++) gives me a better productivity than an IDE (I use the Eclipse and the Netbeans). In the era of IDEs, does it makes sense to learn emacs (or some other tool that you suggest?)

Answer 1

Even if you were using an IDE, it's still useful to know Emacs/VIM. You don't have your IDE around all the time, and while doing something via SSH, you don't really have any other option (yeah you can use nano, but thats not very effective).

Answer 2

Yes, and no.

Yes for the exact same reason why a doctor should be able to get an approximate diagnose from your symptoms by using his experience, and not putting the list of symptoms in a google query and find the answer.

Yes for the exact same reason why airliner pilots are taught to fly without fly-by-wire even if all airplanes are today fly-by-wire, so almost everybody is able to keep them flying.

No, because if you need specific tools to make your life easier, such as GUI designers, Intellisense, access to documentation, then clearly Emacs is not enough. Still, I remember that many developers at Microsoft organized a fund raising for uganda vim children.

Summing up, you need to use what makes you more productive. In many cases, emacs (or vim) is more productive than a huge IDE that makes coffee.

Answer 3

When you do software development, you often deal with a lot of text besides code. I may use an IDE for most of my coding, but often I'll use Vim for plain ol' text viewing and manipulation.

Sometimes I need to view code, SQL scripts, XML, CSV, or TXT files. Other times I may want to perform bulk replacements on those files, or extract out certain chunks of text from it.

IDEs are good for writing and refactoring code, but aren't meant to be used for generic text viewing and manipulation. For that, I'd recommend having the full power of something like Emacs or Vim. Notepad++ can be good too.

In short, use the right tool for the job.

Answer 4

I would say it helps to learn emacs (or say vim).

Personally I'm comfortable using IDE (eclipse) for Java developement, when I code in perl or python I prefer to use emacs. Also if you are in a resource constriant environment (say) starting an IDE like Eclipse (which would crawl if there is anything less than 1GB RAM) to write a perl script might not be feasible. In such cases a vim would be neat tool of choice.

Answer 5

Everyone here seems to think that Emacs/Vim are light-weight compared to IDE's. This couldn't be further from the truth. Even the best IDE's do not have the features that Emacs does. In what IDE's can you program completely without moving your hands from the keyboard, read your email, chat with Jabber, run an integrated debugger, view your calendar, program your own functions, and send dbus commands? That's only the surface of what Emacs allows; I'm sure Vim has similar capabilities.

Answer 6

Ignoring productivity completely; remember why you started programming in the first place. You like to create stuff, you like to know how stuff works, you like creating clever solutions to obscure problems, you like tinkering, you like learning new things, you like creating tools that help you do things.

With this in mind the answer is yes, learn it if you think it will add to the delight to your days. Maybe you will also get some work done along the way. Fiddling with eamcs will not make you melt. You might even make a life-long friend of it. Happy Hacking.

Answer 7

Emacs is an IDE. In fact, you could argue it's a whole operating system.

vi, on the other hand, is an editor.

Yes, it makes sense to learn vi, since it's about the only editor you can use on anything vaguely posix, even if the GUI isn't running or the network is incredibly slow (vi is usable at 300 baud). Basically, it's the unix administrator's safety net of an editor. I've used it to rescue myself from broken device drivers on an OS X server that would only come up so far as single user, so even the must GUIfied Unix out there can still be saved by humble vi.

It makes some sense to learn emacs too, but perhaps not quite so much these days.