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

Mastering a good editor is always worth, as a developer you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs, XML, HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively.

I started to learn Vi like nine years ago, and now I can't live without it.

Whatever which editor you select, I think almost you'll be able to find plugins to have the input model of your editor of choice, in all major IDE's, for Visual Studio you can use ViEmu or the Emacs Keybindings

Answer 2

Learning one will be completley worth it. I personally would recommend emacs but I am biased. Im 99% sure that emacs can be setup to the .net devlopment backend (cant think of the right words sorry).

Answer 3

You should learn at least how to save (:w) and edit files (magic) in VIM--even minimal OS installs have it included. That way if you are stranded on an empty unix box, you can at least edit files.

Otherwise, naw--I dont buy the hype. You've got bigger fish to fry and nano is getting better all the time. Heck, nano has some syntax coloring and auto-indentation and it even works with the mouse over PuTTY.

The best thing to learn is how to configure Samba on your unix box and then use a real text editor on your Windows box like UltraEdit (cue flamewar). I use this configuration for editing anything larger than a config file in /etc.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

I am also a long time C# developer. When developing C++ in Linux, I use Eclipse CDT because it's the closest thing I have found to Visual Studio.

Being quite experienced with vim, I use it for editing Linux config files and such, but I'm not particularly drawn to it for development when I could just use an IDE.

By the way, if you do use vim, you may want to enable line numbers and syntax highlighting; I always add these lines to my ~/.vimrc file:

number on
set syntax

Answer 6

If you're using Vim with VS, or thinking about it, you should be aware of the Vim Intellisense project: http://insenvim.sourceforge.net/