[sf-perl] slides on the perlnow.el lightning talk (Joe Brenner)

Joe Brenner doom at kzsu.stanford.edu
Wed Oct 7 17:33:14 PDT 2009


Fred Moyer <fred at redhotpenguin.com> wrote:
> David Ljung Madison <pm.org at daveola.com> wrote:
> >> ..if you then issue the perlnow "run" command from..
> >
> > perlnow sounds fantastic, but I am a vim geek not an emacs geek.
>
> For what it is worth, I am both a vim geek and an emacs geek.  I use
> perlnow on emacs, and perl-support on vim.
>
> I've found that vim is great for jumping in and out of files, but the
> repetitive keystrokes give me rsi when used for extended periods.
> Emacs takes a bit longer to startup, but is more useful to me if I
> have to spend more than 5-15 minutes in a file.

As we emacs geeks tend to point out, there's really no reason to exit
emacs, so the start-up time doesn't tend to matter.  On my linux box,
the emacs uptimes are only a little less than my kernel uptimes...

This situation does get a bit worse if you're stuck working remotely
over a flaky network connection.

I have the impression that vim is working hard to add emacs-like
features, and the differences between the two are getting more subtle.
Emacs is built around the idea of being extensible -- e.g. ask for
help on a keystroke command, it shows you the documentation for the
function it's bound to, and from there let's you jump straight into the
place in the source code where the function is defined.

But if one goes too far with this, one does find oneself in a twisty
maze of elisp, which not many would call an advantage.



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