Invisible escreveu:
> My editor of choice is currently SciTE, so let's see how it compares 
> against this checklist...
> 
>> Extensible/Programmable
> 
> Well, not so much. You can reprogram the syntax hilighting to handle 
> some unknown language if it matches a known one closely enough. And you 
> can program it to run external commands for you (e.g., compile my 
> program, run this through LaTeX, open XDVI...)

Emacs is so friggin' extensible/programmable that what once was just a 
handy set of macros for text editing turned out as a software 
application platform far before there were things like Eclipse or 
Mozilla XPCOM.  There are file browsers, newsclients, web browsers, cvs 
clients and whatever funky stuff you can think of has already been 
written for and is running on Emacs.  You may try alt+x, doctor. ;)

>> Ported to many platforms
> 
> SciTE runs on both Windows and Linux, and that's all I need.

Ah, yes, the old and tired it-fits-my-purpose argument.  Aunt Jemima 
pulls it around everytime to show how Notepad is just the same as Emacs 
or vim.

>> Internationalization
> 
> Not important to me.

Yeah, surely not important at all, except perhaps for the 3 billions of 
Indians and Chinese plus another billions of people who don't speak English.

>> Many editing modes
> 
> ...and?

Well, for once it means you may edit Haskell with far more ease than 
with simple syntax highlighting.  If you RTFM for that mode, that is.

>> Self documenting with built in tutorial
>> Detailed and well written manuals
> 
> Nice, but secondary. It's good to know a tool is easy to learn, but the 
> question is whether it's *worth* learning in the first place.

When you finally see the light and understand it's well worth, it's 
there for you and you won't bother to bash yet another open-source 
project for lack of documentation.

>> AFAIK notepad is/has none of the above.
> 
> Agreed. Notepad fails in many, many basic ways. But SciTE is quite nice 
> in general.

Yes, SciTE is a wonderful editor.  Even being a helluva less powerful 
than emacs or vim.

> On the other hand, nobody rants on about how amazing SciTE is, but Emacs 
> is considered the One True Editor. I'm just trying to figure out why - 
> and if it's worth trying to use it.

It's worth learning for no other reason than most open-source language 
implementations out there have at the very least a very handy 
language-mode available for Emacs which quickly turn it into a quite 
featureful customized IDE for said language.  Just name it:  haskell, 
ocaml, Erlang, Oz etc.  And I don't mean just simple syntax highlight -- 
any shitty editor these days get that, except notepad sure. 
Command-completion, integration with the language compiler, debuggers etc.

Then, there are also incredibly powerful and handy general purpose text 
editing features that once you learn to use you'll ask yourself how 
you've lost so many unproductive years of your life in lesser editors. 
Like copy-paste cyclic buffer, keyboard macros for performing repetitive 
tasks, quick jumping between visited points in the text (like automatic 
bookmarks everytime you jump around in the text), sessions, editor 
customized to suit language needs and many others.  SciTE (or kate) 
simply still not there at all.

Couple emacs and vim with exuberant-ctags (an external tool supporting 
many languages) and you turn your text editor into an almost as good IDE 
for handling large projects and many files.

First thing to do either in emacs or vim is to run the interactive 
tutorials.  In about 30 minutes, it'll cover the basics and give you a 
good overall sense of what it is and how to use the powerful tool. 
Then, getting help on specific subjects of current interest.

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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