Just curious.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
GNU Emacs, baby!
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/593/emacsq.png
I'm actually a bit of an Emacs fanatic (although, being a computer-science student, you may have met even worse cases). I use it for writing prose, writing programs, planning and organizing (via Org), talking on IRC (via ERC), and interacting with other programs like Maxima (Imaxima is really nice), SBCL (SLIME is pretty cool), and R (ESS is okay). My .emacs is 920 lines long; I really ought to try byte-compiling it.
(The screenshot is actually from my dad's computer, not mine. I convinced him to install Ubuntu, too, which has worked out pretty well for me.)
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
It seems a lot of diehard Linux zealots use Emacs. I'm curious if there's any reason I should switch to it from my current text editor, TextMate. What benefits does Emacs have from a productivity standpoint?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
That depends entirely on what you're comparing it with. I'm not very familiar with editors other than Emacs, but my impression is that, with respect to the primary purpose of a text editor—editing computer programs—all reasonably sophisticated and customizable editors (Emacs, vi, and assumedly TextMate and other newfangled proprietary programs) are about equivalent. Switching editors probably will not make you a more productive programmer. Exception: if TextMade doesn't have good support for quickly moving the text cursor with the keyboard, as Emacs and vi do, I would strongly suggest you switch. Emacs and vi let you easily jump around by words, lines, and pages and copy or delete such units of text without reaching for a mouse. Then again, I infer from what you said in Spock's topic that you strongly prefer clicking to typing. I couldn't agree less, but by now I know better than to argue with you. :P
Outside of plain old text-editing, the nice thing about Emacs is that it can do so many things, so you can combine the advantages of different features. For example, I can do the aforementioned cursor-motion magic while talking on IRC. Also, while any good text editor is customizable, Emacs is probably the most customizable. (This is especially important for me because few programs are as low-vision accessible as I'd like without heavy customization.)
I should warn you that Emacs is somewhat less delightful with a Mac keyboard, even if you rebind modifier keys creatively. :(
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
"TextMade"? Ugh, I'm far underslept.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez