Are there any reasons why a C# developer should learn Emacs/Vim?

Question

I work as a c# developer in a purely Microsoft shop.

I recently started teaching myself assembly using gas and Linux in my free time away from work. I like messing a

Answer 1

I use emacs and Visual Studio together and would have a difficult time without emacs. VS is indispensable of course, but it doesn't deliver the text editing that emacs does. Emacs is 98.4% editing pane for me. Visual Studio has 12 different panels, each of them important, but sometimes I just want to look at the code. Emacs lets me do that. And I can split screens and see 4 editing windows on a single screen, even in the same file. With dual-monitors I can have emacs windows on each one. This sounds kooky but it is very helpful to me when I am working on different parts of the code at the same time (let's say an interface definition and an implementation, at the same time). The regex search-and-replace.

I have auto-revert mode turned on in emacs, which is the analog to the VS feature that says "a file changed outside of Visual Studio, do you want to reload it?" Except in emacs it always silently reloads, which is the way I want it. So I bounce from VS to emacs and back, and there's never a problem with pending changes in the source code that haven't shown up in the other editor. VS has "full screen" capability, but I haven't found that to be as flexible or useful as emacs.

I cannot imagine not having the capability of this combination of tools. Visual Studio alone just does not offer this. Emacs alone wouldn't be sufficient. I still use emacs for basic snippets and small test programs. I use VS for managing projects, TFS, testing and debugging.

My use of emacs is not a choice at this point. I picked it up a long time ago, at a previous company, where emacs was the standard tool, so it was ... not to say "easy" but it was automatic. I cannot imagine learning emacs "on my own." I learned things osmotically, just from the community of other emacs users around me. From the people in the hallway, I acquired and customized a bunch of elisp code for my setup. Doing it with a book... I cannot imagine.

As for making you less productive because of finger confusion... I haven't had a problem.