Emacs

Please forgive this post --- it's embarassingly dorky. But I just got yet another reminder of why I still use Emacs to write code which, at the end of the day, is what I do for a living. I've written for a bunch of systems and a bunch of languages over the years --- and now will be living in the Microsoft .NET world for awhile. Emacs has followed me throughout.

Now that I'm living in Visual Studio 2005 all the time (rather than Linux/GCC where I spent the last few years) I thought I would try to see if I could use the VS IDE for writing code. They've brought back an Emacs emulation mode for the new version, and it actually works pretty well.

But here's the thing. There are two key behaviors that don't work the way I need them to. And without the full programmability I get with Emacs, I'm kind of hosed. VS does have a very rich Macro language, and maybe I'm just not skilled enough with it yet. But the barrier got too high very quickly, so I'm back to my old standby.

Mechanics spend thousands of dollars on their tools. Software developers get Emacs for free, thanks to a lot of hard work from people who really care about and understand what we do. It does have a learning curve, but once you've gotten over that it's hard to go back to anything else.