Editor

This board needs some threads. I'll start the mandatory editor flame thread that all programming discussions require.

Emacs r0x0rz. Vi sux0rz. Vi users eat aborted babies for breakfast.

Actually I use TECO, but that's beside the point.

I think a lot of emacs users use vi or something similarly small (eg e3) to do very quick edits because the editor runs as fast as a random shell command. But for real work, like editing code or writing documents (particularly with some sort of markup) emacs returns far more winnage in comparison with any other editor, despite the load time. When you discover that you have a repeatable sequence of text that can't be easily expressed in a regular expression, like a transformation of an entire paragraph over and over, then emacs is your friend since you can program everything. You don't have to rely on a script of commands, either, since your macro can be arbitrarily complex and still maintain readability (ever tried to read ex commands? or TECO?).

I use vi for short tasks like changing a variable in a config file. But I use emacs for anything that will take more than a couple seconds to do. It just makes the editing process easier.

Maybe someday someone will move the elisp core of emacs out into a library that can be loaded at boot time, but until then emacs users will have to put up with the load time. Actually, if the awful abortion that is the elisp kernel was completely redesigned from scratch like a real Lisp (and no more GCPRO!) then it might equal vi in speed. But it still suffers from being a 20 year old hunk of heavily hacked code.