vi or emacs for editing Python on Linux?

Bruce Eckel Bruce at EckelObjects.com
Sun Dec 23 14:40:48 EST 2001


Long ago, when gnu emacs was first appearing, I was just starting
to use Unix and I began to learn emacs instead of VI, the person
coaching me (as I was sliding down the one-way chute of custom
keybindings) suggested that I *don't* rebind the keys. His scenario
was in going to someone else's machine and working with them. It
stuck, and I didn't.

Alas, after all the stuff I did back then -- including writing an
assembler for a 4-bit Harvard Architecture processor in Gnu-Lisp --
I've forgotten virtually everything I knew about the innards of gnu
emacs. But I still remember the basic keybindings, and have
benefitted greatly from never rebinding them, since I don't need to
get my own keybindings installed every time we do some new
installation.

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 12/23/01 at 2:20 PM Roy Smith wrote:

>Fernando Perez <fperez528 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> The only problem I now have is that even though I fly in Xemacs,
I can't 
>> do anything in a 'raw' emacs, I need *my* customizations :)
>
>This is very true.  I work in a mostly vi shop, but one other guy
and 
>myself are die-hard emacs fans.  Not only can we not edit in each
other's 
>login sessions (because our emacs key bindings are different), we
almost 
>can't even edit on each other's keyboards, because some of the
keys are in 
>different places!
>
>Every once in a while one of us will observe the other doing
somethink
>cool 
>in emacs and say, "how'd you do that?".  As often as not, the
answer will 
>be a slightly puzzled look, followed by pantomiming typing the key
>sequence 
>in mid-air :-)  I've been doing it so long, my fingers know how to
do 
>somethings that I have to conciously have to think about to figure
out
>what 
>the actual keystrokes are.
>
>About all the vi I really know is <esc>:q!<ret>.  If I'm someplace
where 
>there's no emacs, I survive on ed until I can get emacs up and
running.
>-- 
>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list



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