Is it worth investing time in learning to use Emacs?

Answer 1

I love emacs and use it every day.

That said, I don't think the cost of learning it will be recouped by productivity gains down the road.

If you're programming Java, you need a good IDE. Emacs goes a fair way towards being one, but let's face it, IDEA et al beat it hands down. (emacs probably inspired a lot of those IDEs, but that's another story).

Answer 2

I like Emacs, you can extend it by your needs- in my eyes, any system which you can extend by yourself is award-worthy.

Answer 3

No (and I've used both).

Answer 4

Emacs documentation is a forest. I came from Emacs to Vim when I realized how organized Vim's documentation is, and how chordable many of the features are. I don't know what lies down the path of an Emacs expert, but I will warn you that learning to do anything useful in it takes a long time, and won't make you any better at nethack. Stick with Vim.

Textmate is a better Emacs for Macs, though that won't help you with Solaris. Eclipse is kind of cool, and has a lot of plugins.

Answer 5

Generally, emacs is more powerful than vi. You could do a lot more things in emacs.

Answer 6

Disclaimer: I'm ignorant. I've been an emacs user for about 4 years, and vim user for about 6 months, maybe more like 15 if you count all the times I've tried to learn it and hated it. (The writing vs moving mode distinction kills me. Every time. So if it doesn't kill you then my opinion might be completely worthless.) That said, I think my opinion is actually interestingly different from the 26 others that I've seen on here, so I'm going to voice it. :Disclamer

My opinion:

• Emacs is better for typing, especially large-scale "I'm writing a new feature and it will be a while before I even try to see if it runs".
• Vim is better for editing, especially quick edits.

When I need to understand and hack in 8 files simultaneously, Emacs' properties as a tiling window manager with multi-buffer (buffers have a 1.2:1 correspondence to files, they're often the same thing, but aren't necessarily) regexp-search (and replace) are incredible.

If I don't like some small thing because of git diff in the shell (I don't use emacs' VC features very often, although when I do I love them) I open it with vim and get the hell out faster than I could hit Alt-TAB.

The fact that Emacs' editing commands are more readily available while typing make typing much faster than it is in Vim. Ctrl+a is much faster than ESC ^ i, and you don't have the cognitive load of "do I want a or i or o or O..." which, god, I hate thinking about. And same for all the other movement commands commands.

I type faster, much faster, in Emacs. That means things like Org Mode (which I use for everything: TODO lists, bug tracking, notes, long emails, documentation...) make more sense (to me) in Emacs than they would in Vim.

And, Elisp is incredible, even though it sucks. It totally makes up for Emacs' broken regular expressions: you can use the full power of emacs everywhere, including in a multi-file regexp-replacement. And in text snippets.