Blog :: The Importance of <strike>Being</strike> Learning Emacs

I'm about six weeks into my transition to Emacs. That means I only have a little under 10 years before I can be considered an Emacs guru!

Seriously, I am starting to feel nearly as productive in my new environment as I was in Jedit. I still don't have ECB working the way I want it (due to the lack of Semantic Bovinator support for PHP - I'm going to try to remedy this. In the meantime if anybody knows how to make ECB use the imenu or etags support for parsing PHP, do drop me a line.)

One interesting side effect of retraining my fingers has been that my productivity in Linux command line apps has soared. While it has taken practice to quit reaching for the arrow keys, I am enjoying using shortcuts to kill the current line, move back/forward a word, delete/kill a word from bash or the mysql console. MidnightCommander also uses a bunch of emacs shortcuts (C p to move to the previous entry in dialogues, C n to move to the next, etc). Emacs may not have done too much for my code editing speed, but it is helping my console app efficiency grow by leaps and bounds!

Update: MC also features a Emacs compatibility mode in mcedit (sometimes its easiest to edit files remotely through MC).  Also, for Firefox see this and this.

Update: Turadg's php-mode includes imenu support which ECB than picks up. It seems a little buggy however (not all my functions show up, variables in argument lists are all prefixed with "class", etc), but it's progress...

Posted on December 20th 2006, 03:40 PM