Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

> the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs use...

I'd argue that this is ergonmically essential for long-term emacs use, otherwise you run the risk of 'emacs claw'.

Took me less than a week to get used to it. If you regularly use other people's machines then it's not a good idea (but then, neither is emacs unless you are carrying around your .emacs file, since you'll miss all your personal keybindings).

I think you are looking for an editor which feels modern but has the power of emacs,vim or textmate. If you are on Windows, you can try http://www.e-texteditor.com/. If on OSX, http://macromates.com/ Even i used to go round this question. I tried emacs, then vim , then textmate, then e-texteditor. Finally i felt Vim to be comfortable for me. You need to try all of those before settling on one.

I don't think emacs has a steep learning curve for being a really efficient editor, the way (say) vi does. If you can get through the day in emacs without touching the mouse, you're basically there, and the rest is just discovering all the features and ways to customize it.

Force yourself to move the insertion point with the arrow keys, for starters. Then learn a few shortcuts so you don't go insane. C-a for beginning of line, C-e for end. M-f and M-b for forward/backwards by a whole word. C-v and M-v will scroll you up and down through the document and move the insertion point so that it stays on the screen.

Emacs doesn't need a lot of UI. It isn't an IDE, for one thing (though it can be used as one). Customization is done by putting incantations in your .emacs file. Managing buffers and panes only requires a handful of commands; learn the keys for them, or re-assign them if they're awkward.

If you prefer to use the mouse, rather than keyboard shortcuts, you might be happier with something like Acme/Wily (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/). It's not available for all platforms, though.

Emacs is intrinsically a keyboard-driven editor, and mostly just tries to keep the GUI out of the way. Your experience is more meaningful than anybody's dogma about whether keyboard-centric or mouse-centric development is more productive for you, but mostly using the mouse will make it hard to take advantage of what makes Emacs special.

(If you, or other readers, want to really learn Emacs, you should probably give it at least a month. Once you're comfortable with the basics, gradually learning elisp will greatly increase how useful it is for you.)

A couple reasons to not try to immediately make the keyboard shortcuts match the editor you're used to:

* You'll probably overwrite some other really useful keyboard shortcuts unintentionally. C-v (Paste, on Windows) is page-down in Emacs. C-c is the prefix for mode-specific commands; C-c C-c sends email, compiles the function under the cursor, etc., depending on what file / buffer type you're working in.

* Emacs has its own ways to do some of those operations. Copying and pasting under Emacs is fundamentally different because of the "kill ring". Instead of having a clipboard, it has a stack (which loops once you hit the end, hence, "ring").