Emacs is one of those software systems I'm really grateful for. My life is significantly better because I'm in a world where it exists - "better" meaning more joyful, more positively productive, and more enabled to be of service (since I use it for writing articles and opensource software, etc. Not to mention the code behind my company, so it's even helping me create jobs.)
I really, really want to use Emacs. I like the ideas, I like the addons, I like the lispiness. What I can't get over, though, is the pinky contortions and multiple chords required to accomplish things in the editor itself.
I'm not a big fan of vimscript, and the addons seem more clunky, but being able to hit a single key, rather than a chord, or series of chords, to accomplish the basic text manipulations, makes it really hard for me to stop using vim and use emacs for more than a few days.
The Kinesis contour keyboard moves the modifier keys to under your thumbs. Makes a huge difference for Emacs. It makes for a significant amount of retraining, though, too, and vim might still be for you.
I can understand! I actually also use vim a whole lot, which is absolutely wonderful as well. For the pinky/chords thing in emacs, I've be able to adapt by actually using other fingers quite a bit (shifting my hand so I can hold control with my ring or even pointer); and I really don't use multichord combos that much, usually using longer sequences instead (e.g. for indent-region, I hit Esc, then type C-\ rather than typing Alt-Ctrl-\ .) Fortunately this has worked well for me and my hands over time.
> I've be able to adapt by actually using other fingers quite a bit
I actually use the part of my palm directly underneath my pinky to hit the Ctrl key. It works quite well on a ThinkPad keyboard (for my hand shape/size, anyway).
You can avoid somewhat of that with some considered keymappings.
For instance, I remap Control to Alt a ton in emacs. It's very easy for me to thumb-key instead of pinky-key. YMMV, depending on keyboard and hand-size.
As a vim user, I very much lament the fact that there's no good way to run an interactive shell or REPL in vim. The screen hack, Conque, the vim-shell patch, etc., don't match Emacs' REPL functionality.
Seconded. Even after years of using Emacs, I still have to stop for a moment every now and then and think: holy shit, what a motherflippin' piece of software!
I have been using the package manager and it is a much better way to install programs in emacs than the old way of modifying your .emacs and specifying a load path. It works very well. I wish more people would upload packages to the main repository but putting this in emacs 24 will probably accelerate this.
Emacs 24 by default uses the GNU package archive, which is limited to software they want on it.
However, `package.el` defines an alist of `package-archives` which you can add entries to. My hope is that then someone will end up creating a less restrictive package archive to complement the offerings in the GNU one.
Nathan Weizenbaum, of Haml fame, has done some work on a project for creating Emacs Lisp package archives and an accompanying front-end here: http://code.google.com/p/marmalade/
It's just an integration of ELPA (http://tromey.com/elpa/) which has been around for quite a while. According to the mailing lists Tom Tromey will continue to maintain his archive in parallel. I'm not sure what licensing restrictions he has but I'm fairly sure you don't have to assign copyright as per FSF projects.
I never thought putting two or three lines of elisp code in my .emacs file for every package was such a big deal. Actually, as much as I love apt-get on my linux box, I also like the (perceived) feeling of control when I modify my load-path and add a (require) or an (autoload).
I never had the feeling that I need a package manager to handle my external packages. Thinking about that now I guess it's because the packages I use share little to no interdependencies. I'd say that it's the latter where a package system has a really strong point.
But anyway, I'm looking forward to the new feature. I could image it'll be fun to browse a package directory and just randomly try new extensions out, just to see if I like them and be able to get rid of them as easily as I've installed them.
I like the new policy, which seems to be one potentially disrupting new technology per major release. Previously, major releases tried to do too much at once, which lead to some very unstable and sometimes alienating .0 releases.
Emacs always had anti-aliased text if you used it within a terminal that had it.
I never missed anti-aliased text that much - there are plenty of good fonts that render well without it. Now that it has, it looks much better. However, the idea of giving up its power in order to get pretty fonts with a lesser editor is ludicrous.
Emacs 395 would be much nicer than Visual Studio 2150 or an Eclipse named after a small asteroid that hasn't been discovered yet (because, by then, all rounded-body names will have been used)
