Will Emacs make me a better programmer? [closed]

Answer 1

I'm an Emacs fanboy, personally, but Emacs is just a tool. It won't make you a better programmer any more than a super-fancy pen will make you a better writer.

The clarification that "great programmers" adapt their environment to themselves may have some merit, but lots of tools can do that (e.g. vim and SlickEdit), so there's nothing particular about Emacs in that regard.

I think what's most likely true is that "great programmers" are passionate about programming and people who are passionate about it tend to find tools that help drive that passion. Emacs (and vim and SlickEdit, et al) is such a tool.

Answer 2

I know you didn't ask this, but one thing learning emacs (unexpectedly) improved for me was manipulating a command line. Before I learned emacs keybindings I used to move the cursor and navigate history using the cursor keys because I didn't know any better. It was something of a lightbulb moment when I realised I could use backward-word, move-beginning-of-line and backward-kill-word (which I have always bound to C-w, as Stevey suggests) in bash (M-t is often useful too, and most impressive to those who've never seen it before).

I do quite a lot of work on Solaris, where the root shell is "the posix shell", and does not have emacs bindings by default. I find that my fingers now type exec bash of their own accord, every time I log in, so much faster do I feel with the now-familiar editing commands under my fingers.

Must admit though, I still find Knuth's books hard going (though worth it) - so I don't think it's magically improved my programming.

Answer 3

I began with emacs but switched to vi which to me is more elegant because of it simplicity. Also if you ever are stuck in single user mode, ed commands are a subset of vi commands. I don't know if emacs can handle that.

So in that regard I think vi makes you a better programmer..

Answer 4

I'd argue that the best programmers tend to be the ones that will take the time to customize their environment, making it faster/easier to perform the tasks that they are likely to do. Emacs is one of the most powerful editors when it comes to customizing your environment. It has a steep learning curve but, once you're past that, there's virtually no limit to what you can make it do for you.

Someone once said that the best programmers are the lazy ones; the ones that, once they need to do something more than once, find a way to automate it so that it takes less effort to do. Emacs allows you to be very, very lazy ;)

Answer 5

I think Emacs can make you a better programmer, albeit indirectly. I think Emacs got me to actually write in a functional language (Elisp) which has me interested in other functional languages (Clojure) which I'm told will make me a better programmer. That said, I suppose time will tell.

Answer 6

I started using Emacs about a year-and-a-half ago because it was the confluence of several wants -- wanted to work with regular expressions (in an editor that supported them), wanted to learn lisp, wanted a better editor.

Editing my code with regexes taught me a lot about finding patterns in the code. The keystrokes took a while to get used to, but I fly a lot faster without the mouse.

Emacs gave me the ability to keep work with my notes and coding in the same application -- minimal context switching means minimal brain-switching, and I can keep focused on the task at hand.