Source: XKCD’s tribute to emacs
In a world of beautiful, powerful IDE‘s for programming in C++, Java, PHP, Perl, LaTeX, etc, I still use Emacs. For those that don’t know, Emacs is a editor which God used to program the Universe. It was first released in the mid-70′s and like a fine wine has only gotten better with age. Its real power lies in its extensibility, due to the fact that it’s written in the language so perfect it writes itself: Lisp.
I’m joking about most of the above except the fact that I still use Emacs as my main development environment for everything including writing poetry ;-) As the feature list of IDE’s grows, I find it more and more tempting to switch away from Emacs, but every time I do, I find that the large set of features provided by those IDE’s does not map to increased productivity, and always end up switching back.
Who know what the future holds, but I certainly did no envision myself sitting behind something that looks like Notepad when I first started programming in the 90′s, because even then the IDE options were already sexier and more feature-rich.
