On 3/14/07, Luzius Thoeny lucius.antonius@gmail.com wrote:
[snip] I tried emacs and found out why people call it an OS, not an editor :O)
Well, if you like, you don't have to use all its OS features. You can just use it like an IDE, or even just an editor. :)
BTW, note that the actual editing environment for Emacs is very finely tuned after many years of use, and it's very efficient. Little things that are hard to put your finger on (no pun intended :) ), like how move-by-word skips over punctuation in a handy way (Geany (by virtue of its choice of editor component: Scintilla) stops the cursor on each side of punctuation, so it takes more key strokes to move around). Also, Emacs has got features like "redraw screen centered on cursor" (C-l), cut to end of line (C-k), and "select paragraph" (M-h). Little things like that add up to make for a very smooth editing experience, and stiff competition for Geany.
There's also incremental search, which is a very fast way to get around in an editor. (I realize that Geany has find-in-file, and it works well too, maybe even better, but not faster UI-wise.)
Of course, Geany is still young, and may get a number of those features and refinements over time. I'm a fan of both Geany *and* GNU Emacs. So far, IMO, Geany's killer feature is probably how easy it is to learn (though, I haven't tried its Project or Build features).
---John