The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

[blmblm at myrealbox.com]

In article <m31wg480r6.fsf at borud.not>,
Bjorn Borud  <borud-news at borud.no> wrote:

[ snip ]

> a lot of IDE's are getting quite good and you don't have to mouse
> around all that much.  I think the main reason I stick to Emacs is
> because I use it for a wider range of tasks -- not just programming.
> 
> also, the IDE's I've used in the past were sluggish and for some
> reason the font-rendering was really hard to get right (if at
> all). when you spend the majority of your waking hours editing text,
> interactive response time and "editing ergonomics" matter a lot.
> 
> 
> this reminds me that it is probably time to give IDEs another chance.
> it has been a couple of years since the last time I tried a couple for
> Java.
> 

A few words from someone else with a strong preference for "learn
one editor well and use it for all text editing" (though maybe
I should admit that my preference is for vim) ....:

I use Eclipse in teaching second-semester programming, mostly
because my department decided it was good to expose students to
command-line tools in CS1 and a "modern" IDE in CS2.  In general
it's annoying not to have all those years of vi(m) experience
making things easy for me, and a lot of the features others find
wonderful I find annoying, *but*:  

Eclipse has something that generates "import" statements with
a few keystrokes, and for me that's almost in the "killer app
[feature]" class.  (Why do I strongly suspect that with the
right plug-ins emacs can do this too?  :-)   That would send
me searching for the Web site where vim macros are collected.)

-- 
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer:  I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.