use Perl

• Emacs (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361) on 2002.04.25 15:57 (#7547) Homepage Journal

  I'm currently drinking the Emacs Kool-Aid. Choice of flavor: GNU.

  I used to swear by VIM. From the day I discovered emacs, I had the feeling that I was supposed to learn it, and that I would, "some day." It just seemed like the thing a UNIX person was eventually supposed to do. My switch from straight vi to vim just about killed that desire; I figured it was good enough, and I was highly productive with it.

  Then I started noticing that a lot of the programmers I respect use emacs. I started suspecting that there was something I was missing, and that if I changed editors, I would see some incredible results.

  I'm reasonably emacs competent now. I force myself not to use the mouse so I can do everything with the keyboard and truly learn emacs features (I always did the same thing with vim.) I'm currently living with the emacs default indenting style for Perl. (I realize now there are at least two Perl modes; when I grow stronger in the ways of the emacs force, I'll check the other one out in detail.) What I really want is to some day program the way I did in THINK Pascal for Macintosh: I would never press return or tab; the editor handled it for me. Some day I hope to know enough about emacs to make that happen. Even (especially!) if it means I have to do LISP.

  Today I discovered how emacs integrates with version control. I was ecstatic, and shared it with some coworkers who haven't started down this path yet. They thought it was neat, too.

  Looking forward to all the wonderful things emacs has in store for me. Like UNIX, Perl, and vi, there seems to be something new to learn every day.

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

  Reply to This

  • Re:Emacs (Score:1)

    by brianarn (2843)

    I would never press return or tab; the editor handled it for me.

    In cperl-mode in Emacs, it puts a Perl menu on the menubar, which allows for some extra features, and what you describe is (almost) implemented in one.
    
    Auto newline (C-c C-a is the keyboard shortcut for ya, M-x cperl-mode to get into the mode) will automatically newline-and-indent for you after each semicolon, and it also seems to do the same when you write if (conditional) { right after the curly brace. It didn't seem to like doing it a
    • Re:Emacs (Score:2)

      by jdavidb (1361)

      Thank you! As it is now 11:33 in my timezone, I have officially learned two things about emacs today, making this a very good day indeed. :)

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Re:Emacs (Score:1)

    by Mur (229)

    I too, got turned on by Emacs a long time ago, lost it for years (no good PC port), rediscovered it, and standardized on it on both Windows and Linux. I find that I can carry around a pretty basic .emacs file and be confident that I can do the same editing with the same keystrokes no matter where I am.

    --
    Jeff Boes Hyper-real techno priest of Perl