Dragged kicking and screaming to Emacs (2)

At the end of my last post, I was happily going about my business secure in the knowledge that I was a lifetime vim user. Then I stumbled across Paul Graham's essay, Revenge of the Nerds. This essay—like many of his early ones—was about the power and superiority of Lisp. Unlike many programmers of my generation, I had remained mired first in assembly language and then C and had never learned Lisp, but Paul's essay inspired me to finally give it a try. So I picked up a copy of Paul's ANSI Common Lisp, read it cover to cover, and was hooked.

I quickly moved to Scheme and spent the next three or four years using it almost exclusively. I read Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp, and started spending more time with CL. Eventually, I divided my time pretty evenly between CL and Scheme.

One Small Problem

Although I was having great fun playing with the DNA of the universe (XKCD notwithstanding), there was one small problem: it's really hard to program in Lisp effectively using vim. Yes, you can have vim running in one window and the REPL in another, save your edits, load them from the REPL and run your tests, but that's not really a smooth work flow. Yes, some Lisps and Schemes have an IDE, but using them means you have to juggle multiple editors and that you'll probably never master any of them. And yes, I know all about all the vim SLIME-like add ons that are coming real soon now, but after a while one tires of waiting.

So once again I downloaded the latest emacs sources, compiled and installed them, ran through as much of the tutorial as I could stand, loaded Quack and SLIME and started life as a born-again Emacs user. And it was painful. Oh my it was painful. All that vi muscle memory mated with the Emacs key sequences to produce such mutant offspring as CTL-k to scroll backwards—this was especially hilarious because I would often type CTL-k several times before I realized I was deleting lines rather than moving up.

There were other, more subtle, hurdles too. Vi users tend to fire up the editor when they need to edit a file and close it immediately afterwards. Emacs users tend to leave the editor open all the time and even keep buffers around weeks after they're finished with them. So on top of retraining my muscle memory I also had to learn a new way of working.

Epilog

I've been using Emacs full time for about a year now, and am currently running the excellent Emacs 23. All in all, it's been worth the struggle. Writing Lisp code is so much easier that that one thing alone was worth the price of admission. I really like that I can add functionality that exactly suits my needs simply by writing some Lisp. Like many Emacs users, I discovered that the .emacs file is a splendid time trap, easily soaking up any cycles that wander within its event horizon.

I even use some of those features that I made fun of as a vim user. For example, Org-mode and remember are part of my work flow now and I don't know how I ever got along without them. I still don't play Towers of Hanoi though.