The Eighty-Twenty Solution

Just saw Patrick Logan talking about Emacs, responding to James Robertson. I've suspected for a long time that many, if not the majority, of developers at Microsoft, at least on product teams, don't use Visual Studio. I'd bet that most devs at Sun don't use SunOne, or whatever they call it these days, either. I've been wanting to try Emacs since I saw Bill Clementson's presentation, but the RSN Problem still doesn't seem to have cleared. I may end up trying XEmacs again. I'm not a good Pragmatic Programmer, where the rule is to learn one editor really well and use it. As it is, I use 4 editors: Visual Studio.NET, Eclipse, TextPad, and PLT for Scheme (and vi, when I need to use Unix). TextPad is my general purpose notepad substitute. VS.NET is my preference for .NET, things just work better there (except for web projects!). Eclipse is what I use for Java. Eclipse is probably the nicest code editor, at least for Java. What aggravates me about Eclipse is that sometimes, you just need to edit a file; in Eclipse, the file has to be part of a project. I know that this helps avoid problems where you end up with resources that aren't source controlled, but it's still too restrictive for me. One other thing is that Eclipse is the corporate standard, and I'd waste too much time messing with alternatives to be productive. PLT is comparable to Eclipse for Scheme, but there's no source transformation support (aside from pretty printing, which is essential for Scheme) that I know of. VS.NET just works well for .NET; again, only built in source transformation support is code formatting and case changing (I know it's coming someday). Vi, well, vi is designed for a QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure there's a Dvorak compatibility mode, but I don't believe in compatibility modes. Emacs seems to be a the one size fits all option, but an old dog like me may be too stuck in my habits to change. Who knows, maybe I'll just uninstall TextPad and force myself to do the switch.