[vox-tech] missing vim

[Jonathan McPherson]

Mike,

>   I use vim not emacs... could you give a quick overview into what 
> emacs does, that you want, which vim does not do?

Certainly. (Although I hope I don't start an editor holy war).

Some of the main things that attract me to emacs are:

- extensibility; many of the vim extensions feel slightly (or very)
  hacked-on. Vim has a built-in scripting language and can be scripted
  with other languages, but when you write scripts in elisp, they
  basically become part of the editor. 

- major modes for languages; for instance, when I'm writing Python
  code, emacs offers a python evaluation buffer that can be easily used
  without even touching the mouse. Emacs shells for other languages
  (e.g. Haskell) are quite a bit nicer than their command-line
  equivalents. 

  When I'm in TeX mode, typing " results in `` the first time and '' the
  second time. If I type C-h c ", it tells me that " is bound to the
  command tex-insert-quote. Could I script this in vim? Certainly. Do I
  want to take the trouble when someone else has already done it better?
  Nope. (I was a pretty faithful downloader of scripts from vim.org
  awhile back.)
  
- front-ending to other development tools: make, gdb, cvs, etc. 

I'm a pretty big vim-head -- some of you might be interested in my
tutorial on efficient text manipulation for vim (yes, it's for
beginners, so no regular expressions or anything scary):

http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~mcpherso/editing.html

So emacs is saving me time from doing a lot of repetitious work related
to development, but at the same time it doesn't let me get around as
quickly as vim does, and I find that I haven't really saved much time
using emacs because of that. The question is whether or not I can become
proficient enough in emacs' editing commands to make it at least close
to vim in terms of the overall productivity I can achieve.

Jonathan.