Is it worth investing time in learning to use Emacs?

Answer 1

[Disclaimer: personally, I prefer Vim. Disclaimer disclaimer: read on.]

Vim excels in the small: by making motion and action separate concepts and providing facilities for complex repeats, you can perform incredibly powerful editing operations in just a short sequence of keystrokes. You can easily do things in Vim in the normal course of editing that would require you to drop down to scripting in Emacs. Also, most of the power you use comes out of the box, so even if you have extensive .vimrc customisations, chances are you will be able to work productively with any Vim installation.

Emacs excels in the large: by mapping all of its UI concepts directly to basic constructs and concepts in Elisp, it becomes very easy to globally introduce features for specific kinds of files or circumstances, making Emacs something like a text-based and much more structuredly programmable form of Excel. This presumes that you are going to spend a lot of time customising your environment for personal needs and preferences. Of course, Emacs does do its best to make it easy to stay inside that one environment for everything and anything you may want to do.

Ultimately, neither is superior. They offer different styles, and depending on your proclivities, one or the other will suit your personal needs and way of thinking better. It is always helpful to know both (plus more editors), of course. But you aren’t going to be appreciably more productive this way or that.

Answer 2

I was very happy with my Vim, but once I heard of org-mode, I started learning Emacs. org-mode could be one strong reason to learn Emacs.

Answer 3

Along the same line of not looking for a religious war (but go ahead and downvote me if you feel you must), why do you feel that the only option to vi is emacs? Is it the OS you develop on, or just the options you explored?

The Java development landscape enjoys some of the best IDEs these days (both free and paid for), if not the best when it comes to code editing and refactoring support.IntelliJ IDEA even has a vi plugin that can help you feel more at home, for instance (not sure if something similar is available for Eclipse). While changing tools does imply a learning curve, the time spent doing it might be worth it if the leap is big enough.

Answer 4

vi is a kitchen knife.

vim is a really nice, sharp, balanced chef's knife.

Emacs is a light saber.

Most of the time, my job requires me to chop vegetables. Occasionally, I have to take on an entire army of robots.

I've been using Emacs for 20 years. I'm typing in Emacs right now with a widget called "It's All Text" that lets me suck text in and out of text boxes in Firefox. I can go really fast in Emacs. I am significantly less productive without it.

This is highly debateable, but I also think that learning Emacs can teach you a surprising amount about programming.

Answer 5

I really see no reason to switch. I've used vi for a long time and am quite comfortable with it; about every six months I would install emacs to give it a go, then quickly just switch back. Yes there were things I much preferred about vi, but the main reason I never stuck with it is because the time investment to fully learn another editor when I already know an extremely capable one isn't worth it.
I'm reminded of this rather dated study.

In my opinion, SLIME is about the only reason to switch to emacs if you're already proficient with vi.

Answer 6

Twice I've tried to learn Emacs. It just doesn't fit how my brain works, and so I don't use it.

Emacs (or vim) is not significantly better than vim (or Emacs). Both have many options to add to them that allow them to do amazing things. I have no doubt that anything you can get done in Emacs you can also get done in Vim, just not standard.

Try Emacs. See if it fits better. It's a no-lose situation.