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by rdtsc 44 days ago
> Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch.

It's 26 years for me. Emacs is I believe the oldest software I still use. I started on an SGI Irix in 2000. I used it also on HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, and of course all varieties of Linux

> Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.

And many keystrokes work on MacOS, too. That was a pleasant surprise when I got a Mac laptop for work.
2 comments
Ferret7446 44 days ago
It's quite difficult to find software older than Emacs in widespread use. Emacs is one of the "original" software, the first GNU software for which the GPL was created. It competes with vi, whose direct lineage has been broken (nvi and vim are reimplementations).
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jjav 43 days ago
> It's quite difficult to find software older than Emacs in widespread use.

Agredd! Aside from the basic Unix commands (ls, cat, etc), the only substantial program that I use today that I also used in 1991, is emacs.

Well, and perl. I don't write much perl these days, but I have tons of perl scripts accumulated over the decades that I use daily so that counts as using it.

Third oldest for me would be mutt, which is still my primary email client. But I only switched from elm to mutt in.. not sure maybe 1996?

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parl_match 44 days ago
vi recently received an update. C23 compliance and some unicode fixes. it's a feature complete editor!
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ralphc 44 days ago
One advantage of vi is that even though emacs is available on all those systems, vi is actually installed on all of those, setting aside windows. If you know rudimentary vi you can walk up to any of those machines and edit a configuration file well enough to work.
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wpm 44 days ago
mg is installed on macOS by default and is basically diet vanilla emacs. Works fine for quick edits.
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Ferret7446 43 days ago
vi isn't even in the same neighborhood in this regard. You can and should learn vi (and ed!) in one afternoon even if you never use them. Whereas Emacs isn't something you just learn in an afternoon. (And vim is not the same as vi)

That is a separate discussion from whether you should use ed or vi normally. You learn the "fallback" with the hope of never being forced to used them.

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