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Why the old text editor “Emacs” is still in my toolbox
First version is from 1985 — software rarely survives that long!
Chances are you never heard of the text editor “Emacs” — especially if you started your career in this millennium.
I ventured into programming at around the age of 10. This was in the mid eighties and I first dabbled in BASIC on a Commodore 128 and later got in pretty deep with Assembler on the Amiga. I had my first encounter with Unix and Emacs in 1995 as a computer science student. Post graduation, Emacs was certainly one of the first tools I installed as I went to the industry (and Windows). These days, Emacs is clearly outperformed by specialized IDEs such as Visual Studio and the old editor’s user interface looks like a dinosaur from my early programming days. Now, I prefer Visual Studio for C# and VS Code for anything else, but I frequently copy code to Emacs for more advanced edits when the other editors fall short. The main reason is Emacs’ SUPERIOR keyboard macro functionality, but other neat features have also not yet been picked up by other tools. Below is a short run-through of the features I still cherish in Emacs.
Editable keyboard macros
Most decent editors have macro functionality, but few (if any) offers the possibility to edit and…
