Posted on May 28, 2010
After 2 years of being a Vim user I decided to try Emacs. Not because I don’t like Vim, just because I like to try something new and believe it helps me to grow as an engineer.
After a week of playing with Emacs so far I must say that I like it. Although all these key combinations with Ctrl and Meta keys are a bit uncomfortable to use after Vim, it feels like a more integrated environment for programming, writing text, manipulating files and lots of other things.
Also I need to point out that Peepcode’s "Meet Emacs" screencast helped me a lot to learn quickly and painlessly start using Emacs.
If you are also planning to try Emacs I highly suggest to use "Emacs starter kit" — it is a set of configuration files which provide useful customizations for fresh Emacs install, because default settings are not always good for beginners. Getting Emacs starter kit is easy:
$ git clone http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit.git ~/.emacs.d