From Wikipedia’s entry on the Editor’s War, we can see some nicknames of GNU Emacs, such as “EMACS Makes All Computers Slow”, “Esc Meta Alt Ctrl Shift”, etc. I found the second one true. I tried using Viper, but it’s inconvenient to browse info files since the <C-]> button doesn’t work. As a result, I need to toggle Viper using <C-z> all the time. Nevertheless, it’s too inconvenient. Maybe that’s because of my low level of Viper set (level 1), and there are other plug-ins that enables users to use Vi(m)’s key bindings in Emacs, but I’m tired of this sort of tedious work.

After overcoming a steep slope in the very first part of the learning curve of a powerful tool, maybe you’ll find out that there’s some other more productive tool for doing the job. That’s not something new and that’s the reason for so many different tools to come up. For example, Vim is originally intended to be part of the shell, and you’ve spent hours to get a Vim plug-in for GDB integration (e.g. pyclewn). Finally you found out that you forgot that both Emacs and GDB are developed by GNU, and they are the early famous softwares from GNU, so they should work well together. Otherwise, how can GNU encourage users to use free softwares? Therefore, it’s sensible to expect that Emacs has a built-in support for GDB. (And it does!)

Hence, the best way is to be flexible and use suitable tools to do different jobs.

After realising the use of both of the two most famous text editors for *nix users, it’s important for us to get use to them. As a Vim user, reading the official Emacs tutorial available on the homepage of Emacs, I’ve found out that it’s too long if what I need is to do some basic editing work. Some introductory web pages on elementary Emacs commands from some tertiary educational institutions can help some newbies of Emacs, but if you can link up new knowledge with any previously known ideas, it’ll be even better to refer to this post.