Invisible wrote:

> It just seems to me that now almost everything Emacs does can also
> be done by half a dozen other tools - most of which don't require
> you to memorise long sequences of keyboard acrobatics to do
> things. So while I get that Emacs seemed amazing 30 years ago, why
> do people still use it today?

Don't know Emacs, but I'll try to give an answer for Vim which may
be relevant. I have tried Scite, but don't remember much about it.
Scite may be able to do more than I think it can.

1. Macros and functions

2. I have become fond of a portion of the many small moving/editing
tools which (in may case) work more quickly that selecting text w/ a
mouse or moving with the scroll bar.
Some of my favorites:
   zz Center cursor line on page
   cw erase a word
   C-a increase next number by 1
   n C-x decrease next number by n
   % move to the cursor to the matching bracket or parentheses
   C-d like pagedown, but only half a page
   gg beginning of a file
   * next occurrence of word under cursor
   gq rearranges text to fit in variable "textwidth" columns
     (used to format the quote in this message)
     (I don't like broken lines in quoted text)
   :n go to line-number n

-Shay

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