[ale] Emacs multiple buffers vs. multiple terminal connections

[Michael B. Trausch]

Jeff Lightner wrote:
> 
> Actually it is on topic.  Personally I never load emacs anywhere (no 
> matter how much developers beg) but it is certainly a Unix/Linux
> utility available in the world. FYI:  It is available for Unix (in
> fact one system I used to work on the vendor loaded emacs and taught
> me to use it for doing customizations of their code) and that was
> back in the early 90s.
> 
> The main benefit most developers tell me about when they want it is 
> "multiple windows" but since we can open multiple PuTTY or xterms
> this has never seemed a good selling point to me.
> 

Multiple buffers in emacs is actually quite beneficial.  One can use the
copy-paste mechanism in emacs (C-space, move the cursor, C-w, then move
to the right buffer and C-y for paste, for cut/paste), and it preserves
all of the tabs and such which PuTTY may or may not do for multiple
terminal windows.

Also, and this is probably really only useful on heavily loaded systems,
less terminal windows is less processes, which means less memory usage
for the more productive members of a team.  I only run one Emacs session
that persists for me all day long, and I use it for everything that has
to do with programmer's editing, general editing, building, and then some.

Also, it saves you on PTYs that are allocated, which can be helpful.
But, the biggest savings probably would come from not having separate
instances of a shell and editor for people who want to work on multiple
things at the same time.  :-)

Anyway, for me, the command structure of Emacs is better; you can embed
configuration data in files and make sure that everything is good no
matter what system you're editing it on, you can have multiple buffers,
and, when using it under X, you can use multiple windows to have things
in.  Extending it is easy (I took a look at making 'vim' do something I
wanted it to do the other day... meh.  You can do it, but it doesn't
seem very easy), and the latest snapshots of it include support for more
features than ever before, including fixing the long lacking support for
Subversion.  More often than not, I use it for the built-in integration
of version control systems and the exemplary support it has for
programming.  vim supports syntax highlighting, but that's about the
only thing that I can think of that it supports that I would use.  Emacs
does *so* much more... :-)

	-- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch <fd0man at gmail.com> - Jabber: fd0man at livejournal.com

Demand freedom: Use open and free protocols, standards, and software.

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