I think the two non-negotiable features for a programmers editor are regular expression based search and replace, and keyboard macros. Everything else is window dressing by comparison.

@ Karthik:

Granted, same can be probably said for any environment/language combination. If you don’t use it for a while, you tend to forget chunks of it. But most of the time you can get back into it rather quickly.

@ Mitlik:

Glad I could help. I think I got most of the vim evangelism out of my system for at least few weeks now, so there will be other topics here to read in the next few days. :)

As comment for this general arc in the blog: thanks for all the great information. I have been interested in Vim and even started reading the tutorial stuff a few times now, and I generally end up stalling out because of the sheer amount of words used to get to anything. The Vim as a language thing was really information dense and understandable. Seeing that kind of power might give me the determination to read the 90 some usr_*.txt files.

Why is this “an uncomfortable truth”? What reason is there to believe every tool for a job is equally efficient?

One other thing I’ve noticed about using emacs is that the transition from power user to plugin writer is cyclic; a month or two of extensive elisp-ing followed by an year of straightforward usage means that when I next need to change something, I have to go back and read the elisp manual and start over. (I usually just end up running a combination of shell utilities.)