Ask HN: Why do you still use Emacs/Vim?

Modern IDE’s have many nice, fancy features. Yet I still find myself preferring Emacs. I also have much respect for those who use Vim. So, why do you (or not) use Emacs or Vim?

at work, lots of scripts are in bash script. I tried using fish shell, but it doesn't support bash script well.

Emacs, for the following reasons:

1) Key chords/features have become a second nature. I've tried using Idea when working on legacy Scala/Java codebases and its Emacs compatibility mode caused a lot of frustration: enough key bindings implemented to make me forget it's not Emacs and then fall hard on my face when I tried using a more advanced Emacs-ism without thinking.

2) Latency. Again, tried using Idea and couldn't get used to the feeling of it being sluggish compared to Emacs. It's like listening to a low bitrate MP3 or something.

I programmed for over 15 years before I got into Emacs. I grew up with Visual C++ and later on used Eclipse, Netbeans and XCode.

Along the way I realised I wanted a text editor with live-coding capability. I wanted to be able to write code on the fly in some sort of DSL to manipulate text while I was working on it, in conjunction with normal gui manipulation tools.

I started thinking about writing my own editor with Qt and V8 until a friend told me that Emacs could pretty much do what I wanted.

I had always been aware of Emacs but I thought it was just an old editor with an ugly gui with thousands of features and keyboard shortcuts I'd struggle to remember :) I didn't know it was an interactive Lisp programming environment.

While plenty of editors have plugins, to the best of my knowledge only Emacs offers an interactive programming environment where writing code is part of how you use the software. I mean, you can actually write Elisp code straight into the text/html/c document you're working on and run it.

So as long as there are no other editors with that kind of capability, I'll carry on using Emacs. The only thing that would replace it for me would be some kind of Super-Emacs running Common Lisp within a modern graphical interface.

I still use IDEs all the time though for Java and C++. My least favourite programming activity is dealing with project settings, build tools and configuration so I let the IDE handle that :) I use Emacs for everything else.

Intriguing... What do you do then?