Is it worth investing time in learning to use emacs?

Posted by Andrew on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andrew
Published on 2008-09-07T01:22:09Z Indexed on 2010/06/17 17:33 UTC
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Filed under:

vim

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emacs

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editor

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text-editor

Right up front: I do not want to start a religious war.

I've used vi for as long as I can remember, and the few times I've tried to pick up emacs I've been so lost so quickly I've given up. Lots of people find emacs very powerful, however. Its programmability is somewhat legendary. I'm primarily doing Solaris+Java development, and I'd like to ask a simple question: will my productivity increase if I invest time in getting my head around emacs? Is the functionality that it offers over vim going to be paid back in productivity increases in a reasonable timeframe?

Repeat: I don't want a "my editor is better than yours". I just want a yes or no answer as to whether it's worth investing the time or not. Will my productivity really increase?

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