Should I learn to use Emacs? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Honestly I don't think you'll be more productive at all. Emacs was fine as an editor a decade ago but a modern IDE--particularly IntelliJ of which I'm a big fan--comes with so much more than an editor, including a debugger, the ability to refactor your code, seamlessly move classes and packages, etc etc etc. A huge part of the productivity benefit of an IDE comes from those features rather than the editor.

If you're not using vi/vim as a primary text editor (meaning using it for significant development effort or just significant time) then whatever you use is ancillary to your IDE.

Answer 2

If, after reading this analysis of editor vs IDE, you would consider yourself a language maven, then you should learn Emacs. Otherwise, you should not.

Answer 3

It's a pretty good idea to learn using either Emacs or vi well. You will then be able to decide for yourself what works best for you. Perhaps you will end up using both; IDEA for one thing; the "editor" in other situations.

Which editor (emacs or vi) is pretty much a matter of taste. It's very helpful to have local experts who can answer "Hey, how do I do X using editor Y". If your colleagues swear by emacs, then I'd say give it go.

Answer 4

Learning Emacs isn't a bad idea: many IDEs (e.g. Eclipse, and NetBeans -- when last I used it) have support for the same (or similar) key-bindings. Though these bindings can be confusing at first, they can, in my opinion, greatly increase your speed on the keyboard, as your hand never really leaves the "home" position. In a more mature IDE, this is invaluable.

Of course, having become so accustomed to Emacs key-bindings, I now struggle whenever they're not available.

Answer 5

'emacs' is great but if you are comfortable with 'vi' and wont be heavily using it then you are better off not putting serious time into learning emacs. emacs is fun and gets quite intuitive over time. So, I would say spend 10 to 15 mins everyday and see how it works for you.

Answer 6

I've always preferred vim for simple text editing, but I prefer elisp for extending the editor. These days I use emacs for my serious editing and vim for quick things when I'm ssh'd into a server.