Happy second thoughts about Emacs

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I learned Xemacs in 2006, when I was working at Category4. That place had the kind of setup where it made sense to spend all day in ssh, working on the dev server. (Surprisingly, there was no version control at that place. It was the last professional outfit where I worked that lacked version control. Since then, every project I’ve worked on has used Subversion.)

For some reason, I switched to simpler text editors after I left Category 4.

This month I’ve gone back to using Xemacs. I like it so much that I can not remember why I ever quit using it. It takes a few days to get used to all the keys, but once you are over that, it is an amazingly powerful and flexible text editor.

One trick that worked for me: when you start using Xemacs (or Emacs) do not use the Control key, just use the M key (that is the Escape key) for everything, and then type out the commands that you want. This is a slow, verbose way of doing things, but you really get to know all the commands. Especially useful is that Xemacs support auto-completion and hinting for commands, so you can type “b” and hit tab and it will list every command that starts with a “b”, such as buffer-menu. For me, at least, this was a great way to learn.