Dragged kicking and screaming to Emacs (1)

I've been a staunch vi user for more than a quarter of a century, and although I never enlisted in the vi/Emacs holy wars, I was firm in my belief that vi—and especially its vim incarnation—was the right thing. I liked that it was lightweight and would start in an instant (although to be fair, that was less true of vim). I considered vi's modality—the main complaint of its detractors—a feature because it meant I didn't have to take my hands off the home row. It was fast and after all those years I was fast when I used it: all those cursor movement commands were burned into my muscle memory and I didn't have to think about them. It was almost as if vi were reading my mind.

Emacs, on the other hand, seemed bloated and clunky. Its huge memory footprint (neatly captured by the retronym Eventually Mallocs All of Core Storage) meant that it was painfully slow to start up. Its lack of modality meant that control sequences had to make extensive use of the metakeys giving rise to another retronym: Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift. Its list of features, including a Towers of Hanoi puzzle seemed almost a caricature of marketing-driven featuritis.

Still, there were some things in Emacs that did invoke envy in the vi user. Its use of multiple windows meant that a user could edit related files (or different views of a single file) at the same time. Multiple buffers meant that a user could quickly switch between files without having to save the current file. Dired meant that a user could see the files in a directory and pick the right one to edit without having to fire up a separate shell and run ls. The built-in man command meant the user didn't have to leave the editor to make a quick check on the exact calling sequence of a function.

So every few years I'd make an attempt to adopt Emacs, but I was always overcome by minor annoyances: the jump scrolling seemed jarring; cursor control was physically painful; moving forward or backwards by words left the cursor in unexpected places; even the terminology seemed wrong (for example, yank means something else to the vi user). The result was always the same. I'd come home to vi but wish it had some of those neat Emacs features.

Finally, vim came along and provided most of the missing pieces that Emacs had but vi didn't. I was now completely content with vim and fully expected to stay with it until the heat death of the universe. But then something happened that changed everything.

—to be continued