[nimms]

I switched from VIM to emacs. While a lot of the nice things in emacs can eventually be backported into vim, I think the extensibility and apples all/most of the way down approach of emacs is superior. Even after using it for 6 years, I'm continually astounded by the things people do with it.

I've just discovered pabbrev-mode for js and ruby editing. It's off the hook.

Also once you've coded with a repl in an inferior shell buffer, you won't know how you ever did without it

[silentbicycle]

While the extensibility of Emacs could be ported to vi, it isn't fitting with the culture/design. The best summary I've heard is that vi is an editor, Emacs is an environment. (I prefer vi as an editor, but use Emacs. Go figure.)

pabbrev rocks! The fact that you can just add that sort of functionality to Emacs is telling.

[nimms]

yeah, I think a lot of the frustration with the emacs editing experience comes down to its standard keybindings. While on a level they do make sense, there's far too much cruft and history in them. Having to type multiple keystrokes to do things like save files, switch buffers, split windows etc is pretty poor in this day and age. I used to use vimpulse until I discovered ergo-emacs. It provides a really good set of alt keybindings for the most common emacs commands. Makes using emacs so much nicer

[evanrmurphy]

Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about pabbrev-mode! This should help me show the IDE guys that Emacs can still dance. ;)