>>> 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.

I'm just trying to figure out whether Emacs does anything that SciTE 
doesn't which will be useful to me, that's all.

>>> 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.

I didn't say it's not important to them, I said it's not important to 
*me*. Different thing.

>>> 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.

By pure coincidence, some people have just been debating this very 
thing. Apparently the existing Haskell major mode works quite well, but 
indentation doesn't work right.

>>> 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.

I wonder if this is like "seeing the light" about Lisp. People claim 
that learning Lisp will transform your life. Personally, I found it did 
no such thing...

>>> 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.

Well, SciTE isn't perfect, for sure. It's a PITA to configure the thing, 
and there are certain things you just can't get it to do right. But 
overall, it's a damn site nicer than Notepad.

> 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.

So you're saying it's the network effect - because so many people use 
it, a lot of useful code is developed for it?

> 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.

Now, see, that all sounds very nice. But SciTE and Kate both have 
sessions, and I never use them. (Indeed, it would annoy me to open up a 
new editor window and get the files I was working on last time.) Several 
programs have a clipboard that can store multiple items, and again I 
never use it. Having marks sounds useful, but I suspect in practice it's 
far too fiddly to figure out which mark you're trying to jump to. These 
things all *sound* useful, but in practice probably too hard to use.

Let's face it, every text editor on Earth worthy of the name has cursor 
movement. And yet, when I type a sentence and realise I made a mistake 
typing it, rather than just move the cursor to where the mistake is, 
it's often simpler to just hold down the backspace key and delete up to 
where the mistake was, and then retype everything after that. If I don't 
use such a basic feature as cursor keys, how much am I going to use a 
cyclic undo buffer?

One feature I actually *want* and that no known editor seems to have is 
the ability to do stuff to tabular data easily. Like, if you suddenly 
decide that you need to append the same piece of text to all 10 lines. 
Or you have a grid of numbers, and you want to add another column in the 
middle. Or stuff like that. Since Emacs == Lisp, it seems that you could 
probably spend 20 minutes writing some code that would do what you want. 
(And, indeed, potentially you could even generate text algorithmically, 
although I don't know how hard that is...)

> 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.

Playing devil's advocate: Why use something "almost as good as an IDE" 
when you can use an actual IDE?

> 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.

Maybe I will, just for giggles...

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