I sure wish he'd stick to technical stuff. The combination of arrogance and ignorance displayed in that essay is a bit too much. I'd be a lot happier if he'd release another version of Arc than to peddle this drivel :(
Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness.
I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime, etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script - I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys.
The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature.
I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility automatically.
The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great.
The architecture seems better than vim.
I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and making the keybindings comfortable for me.
The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame control.
I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)
I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently.
I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states, if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about how to get it running with nice fonts:
"Couldn't you write some standalone scripts to run from the commandline to insert new posts into your blog?"
As someone mentioned in the comments on that site, there's no need to write special scripts for this - using script/console does the job nicely with Rails.
script/console
post = BlogPost.new("title", "body", ... )
post.save
^d
You're modifying the database vs. in memory objects, but when you're scaling up via multiple app server instances, it's handy to store the info in the db.
I sure wish he'd stick to technical stuff. The combination of arrogance and ignorance displayed in that essay is a bit too much. I'd be a lot happier if he'd release another version of Arc than to peddle this drivel :(