Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Python, Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

Wed, 01 Dec 2004

Jumped to Emacs

I did a third attempt to get Eclipse working and I got it mostly working but it didn't jive with our codebase very well and it takes GOBS and GOBS of memory.

I decided NetBeans took up too much memory as well (200MB at various points depending on what I was doing) and I kept bumping into weird NullPointerExceptions in the IDE itself. If I had more time, I'd spend more time: a) fleshing them out, b) providing bug reports. But the issues were too sporadic and it was taking too much time to come up to speed to the point where I could use it all the time. And the VSS plugin was kind of flakey and made me nervous.

I uninstalled both NetBeans and Eclipse and installed Emacs. I stuck Viper mode at 2 and after reading documentation for a bit, I finally made some connections I didn't make the last time around with Emacs and I've been working with it most of today and part of yesterday without any issues.

Helpful Emacs links:

[ category: /dev | Permalink | 4 comments ]
Posted by Christopher Baus on Wed Dec 1 17:52:47 2004
This the reason I always find myself going back to emacs.  It might not always be perfect, but it is always there for me.  I've wasted so much time with IDE's that do 1/2 of what emacs does that I always find myself hitting ctl-x ctl-s in the end.


Posted by Andy Todd on Wed Dec 1 22:04:07 2004
Dumb question, why emacs and a vi emulator? What does this give you that Vim doesn't? I presume that there are extras features that you wish to use and would be interested to hear your thoughts.


Posted by will on Thu Dec 2 08:25:52 2004
Well, Viper isn't a vi emulator.  It's a minor mode that allows me to use vi keybindings inside of Emacs.  So I get all the Emacs stuff (and the ability to do Emacs things) and the vi keybindings that I'm already used to.

There are some Vim macros that make Java development easier, but they're nothing like JDEE (http://jdee.sunsite.dk/) .

So that's part of it.  The rest has to do with talking to people I know who switched from vim to Emacs using the same path and learning their experiences.

I'm just trying to do more with less without dumping gobs of time into it.  I don't want IDEs and editors to become a hobby.


Posted by John Fouhy on Thu Jan 6 22:14:38 2005
I've used Emacs/Viper as my main editor for some time now.. Some advantages it has over vim:

- I'm used to emacs.  I'm familiar with vi, but I never learnt how to handle multiple buffers and the like in vim.
- You get access to the full power of emacs, such as its integration with other software.
- emacs integrates yank/put with the system clipboard.  This means I can copy from a different window and then use 'p' to insert the text.  This is a significant feature, for me :-)

I think, for me though, it comes down to the fact that I like the power of basic vi text manipulation, but I am familiar with all the extras in emacs (and am not familiar with the extras in gvim).


Please keep comments appropriate. I reserve the right to remove anonymous comments, flames, spammy, inappropriate, and other comments that I deem to be worth removing.

Note: New comments get placed in a "draft" status and will NOT show up on the site until I explicitly approve it. Usually that happens within 24 hours, but sometimes I go away and it takes a day or two.

Note 2: There is now a preview button for those of you who want to see a preview! However, it doesn't quite work the way you'd think it should work. I'll look into adjusting it some day.

Note 3: If you can't for some reason post a comment, send me an email: willg at bluesock dot org.

Your name:


Your e-mail address (this doesn't get displayed to anyone--I use it to contact you if there are issues):


URL of your website (optional):


Comment:


Yes, I am a human!

pyblosxom::2.0 dev

All contents Copyright 1996 to 2008 Will Guaraldi.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.