Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Marc Weber <marco-oweber@gmx.de>]

Excerpts from Emanuel Berg's message of Wed Aug 28 03:08:27 +0200 2013:
> Are there vim equivalences for rmail and Gnus?
It was not about "managing mail", but about "writing" mails.
Even mutt can use vim as editor. (I use sup).
I agree that managing mail with Vim might be a lot harder.
I never tried the notmuch interface for Vim.

> I hate FB and blogs (the technology that is, I know there are good
> blog posts), and the bare thought of writing in a browser is
> repulsive. (Unless the browser is Emacs-w3m.)
:-) 
Maybe its time to advertise yet another project:
http://plover.stenoknight.com/

I'm pretty sure you'll have a hard time to beat those speeds with
either Emacs or Vim (Luckily you could use both :)

> Let's put it this way: all the programmers I've met who I have
> respect for, as programmers and otherwise, use Emacs or Vim.
:-) I tend to agree.

> > Eg one thing which comes to my mind is "disassemblers", there
> > are some dedicated tools which eventually outperform Emacs.
> What's that?
http://www.ollydbg.de/ (I bet it has features emacs does not have).
Wether "programming assembler" or hacking executables for educational
purposes is a common task is debatable. I'd be interested in whether the
author used Vim/Emacs to write that tool :)

> It *is* Emacs or Vim. 100%. Why on earth would you use Word (?!) -
To read .doc files which people may have sent you.

I tried switching to Emacs for two weeks, but in the end it was too
hard, I was addicted to Vim (and my custom extensions) too much.
The price was high: I had to rewrite quite a lot of plugins from
scratch, such as ruby debugging, php debugging, plugin management,
ruby/python repl with completion and such. I had to write a Vim version
of scion, of ensime, ... and I've been unable to maintain all of this
due to lack of time, and some of the code is not portable.

Eventually I would have wasted less time if I had started with Emacs.
Who knows?

Simple list of extensions I tried using in the past (I had to write Vim
support code for - but which I was unable to maintain due to lack of
time):

Started by Emacs users:
- scion (Haskell compilation server)
- ensime (Scala support)
- blender python patch (so that you can code blender python code in
  emacs)

Started by Vim users:
- eclim (headless Eclipse as server for Vim to get completion, error
  checking and the like). There is a port for Emacs (no idea about its
  current state)

Of course this list is incomplete, yet it shows that Emacs users are
active and writing support code for new stuff.

Marc Weber