xradiograph - Emacs

THE flexible, extensible text editor

configuration & macro tools cemented together by (a form of) Lisp.

All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. Not the great gal in the cube next to you. Not Fred, the amazing guy down the hall. I’m talking about the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings, the Donald Knuths, the Paul Grahams2, the Jamie Zawinskis, the Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it. Go look over Paul Nordstrom’s shoulder while he works sometime, if you don’t believe me. It’s a real eye-opener for someone who’s used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs their whole career.

—Steve Yegge: Emacs is the 100-year editor.

I’m 38, but came (back) to programming about 6 years ago, starting with Visual Basic 6 (ay-yi-yi!). A co-worker would hard-code all his Perl in a text-editor (INCLUDING forms), which boggled my mind, but did not entrance. Slowly, I started using humble MS notepad for... notes while on the phone, open tasks throughout the day, etc. And slowly, I started wanting more. A number of other factors (desire to work closer to regexes, old desire to learn LISP [I came of age in the 80s, if you know what I mean]) lead me through a couple of editors, and finally to Emacs.

Now, I get frustrated in IDEs that I can’t key-navigate and tweak to my heart’s content.