A week using Emacs
From a consensus vote of two (Hunter and Jason) out of three, Emacs is the preferred editor of Smarkets.
Historically, my editor experience runs roughly thus:
- Notepad (early days of learning HTML from liberally using “View source”);
- Dreamweaver (college);
- Homesite (post-college until 2007); and
- TextMate (2007 onwards, when thankfully I’ve had a Mac).
with a little Vi(M) interspersed here and there as my server—side editor.
In an effort to fit in a bit better with the team (and because they continually bang on about it like it’s the greatest thing since the Internet), I’ve committed to trying Emacs for a week of full time development. I’ll write up a review of my thoughts at week end.
Misgivings
In the interests of disclosure, I have some misgivings about Emacs:
- The lack of respect it will have for OS X–wide keyboard shortcuts. Having to re-learn keyboard commands just to cut and paste (for example), will drive me up the wall;
- Using Elisp to configure it;
- The auto—indent mode of Emacs doesn’t work very well with my HTML coding style. Emacs thinks it knows when/where you’d like to indent code, and pressing “tab” will guess for you. I prefer HTML to just indent 4 spaces when I tab.
See you back here in a week for the review (and hopefully solutions to common web developer problems that Emacs causes).
