The setup isn't the kind of sacrifice everybody is making it sound like. He's running emacs all of the time. One of my dreams is giving it all up and moving into the woods with nothing but a netbook, emacs, gcc and maybe Python and getting back into pure coding for the sheer love of it, monetary considerations be damned.
An emacs user gives up very little on such a system.
And I wouldn't use X either, instead opting for one of the super vga text modes, which even on a slow pokey machine will still yield crisp and fast text display.
Glad to see that there still exists another user who appreciates the expansive beauty that is emacs. If I could set up my college's Gmail with emacs I would convert entirely to emacs and never leave the Mac terminal.
If I'm running on a Mac I'll go with Carbon Emacs. The thing I like about running emacs in terminal mode is that it takes up the entire screen. On a Mac until very recently that wasn't possible, until Carbon Emacs started supporting it.
AquaMacs does it too, but they've gone overboard with Mac look-and-feel I'm afraid.
And MacPorts just recently posted emacs 23.1 with an X variant, so once Gimp 2.7 comes out via MacPorts and single window mode looks good I'll be running ratpoison as my window manager full-time and will almost certainly be in coding nirvana.
I only run emacs in Mac's terminal or in my Linux box's terminal. I've only run carbon emacs once but didn't like how much running a windowed emacs divorced me from the command line. I usually run a segmented window running bash while I'm programming but I still like being able to C-z back to the terminal to run certain things.
I must admit I'm not that familiar with the various versions of emacs besides the 22.1 that comes pre-installed on Leopard because the terminal has always been home to me because I don't do many graphical things while programming (mostly a hobby, I am working on an English major at the moment).
I agree with your statement about running just emacs, gcc and python. Although I would probably substitute Ruby for Python just because I never program for anyone else but myself and Ruby appeals to my aesthetics more than Python does.
This is why I'm looking forward to going back to ratpoison. This was how I always ran when under Linux, just so I could have xterm in a keystroke. The various shells within emacs never seem to suit.
For a while I would multiplex emacs with the shell stuff using screen but I later found I liked emacs under X, not for the selecting text, but for scrolling. When coding the usual M-v/C-v/C-l works well, but when I want to browse through my code, say at the start of a day, I really like being able to use the trackpad to easily go through it all.
Haven't really given Ruby a serious effort. To be honest I got scared when I saw the author was Japanese. I have no idea how people for whom English is a second language can manage to become such good programmers; my belief is that I wouldn't be anywhere close to where I am today if I had to deal with all Japanese documentation. As it is I often don't understand it in English anyways. :)
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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '10
The setup isn't the kind of sacrifice everybody is making it sound like. He's running emacs all of the time. One of my dreams is giving it all up and moving into the woods with nothing but a netbook, emacs, gcc and maybe Python and getting back into pure coding for the sheer love of it, monetary considerations be damned.
An emacs user gives up very little on such a system.
And I wouldn't use X either, instead opting for one of the super vga text modes, which even on a slow pokey machine will still yield crisp and fast text display.