OT: Editors

[Walter Bright]

On 8/2/2012 3:44 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 8/3/12, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>> An editor I wrote years ago had the rendering code in a separate thread from
>> user input. You never had to wait to type in commands, the rendering would
>> catch up when it could.
>
> I bet every programmer eventually tries to implement their own editor,
> even if just for fun. So how come you didn't stick with your own
> editor? I guess someone recommended Emacs and that was it, huh? :)
>

I still use it. Microemacs. Although it was before threads, I faked the threads. 
On fast, modern machines, this speedup turns out to be irrelevant, but it 
mattered on old DOS 16 bitters. But I learned that this was how to do things 
with interactive apps.

In many ways I find Microemacs woefully inadequate these days (for example, no 
unicode support), but my fingers so damn used to it it's hard to change, and it 
does have some lovely C/D specific stuff in it. It's so much better than Notepad 
(Windows) and Nano (Linux).

It's an old friend, like the socket set I got as a kid that I still use on my car.

The nice thing about Microemacs is it works exactly the same on every machine I 
have. It's not like "here's this great Linux editor, and oh there's this crappy 
crashy version of it that sort of works on Windows." Or an IDE that only works 
on one system.

Emacs - always seemed to me like firing a cannon at a cockroach. I just want to 
edit a file, not sit around waiting for an operating system to load. M.E. loads 
*instantly*.

VIM - This is probably what I should use, as it is crisp & snappy. I use it now 
and then, but it just hasn't 'hooked' me.