ide - Young people using Emacs?

Question

I am a college student that has fallen in love with Emacs. I have used IDEs in the past, and although features like Intellisense made the switch to Emacs very hard, I now think that Emacs is much more powerful, and features like Intellisense can be pretty closely matched by various modes depending on language (and I am not referring to M-/). I am happily writing Elisp code for everything that I need that isn't provided by modes or by Emacs itself and I love the way that it adapts and molds to my needs.

However, I do think that its main disadvantage is the fact that it has a pretty steep learning curve and that most new programmers will not even begin to learn it out of many common misconceptions.

So, I want to know the opinions of young people (or any person who didn't start using Emacs before there were IDEs) that are Emacs users. Just to get some reassurance that Emacs is not dead within our Eclipse-loving generation =). (Opinions of users of any other highly extensible editor like Jedit are also welcome)

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/518669/young-people-using-emacs

Answer 1

My "highly extensible editor" of choice is vim. Started using vi 10 years ago, at age 17, and I haven't really looked back. I like to stay away from my mouse as much as possible.

I rarely work in compiled languages these days, so the only thing I feel like I'm missing from an IDE is syntax-completion. Constantly switching to a browser to look up the order of arguments to various PHP functions gets a bit tedious.

PS: I don't want to start a vi/Emacs war here. I suspect that Emacs and vi[m] users have more in common with each other than either group has with IDErs.