Recordable keyboard macros.

That one feature keeps me coming back to editors from the Emacs family (gnu emacs, XEmacs). I learned Emacs in college, and despite my efforts to leave it behind, it keeps coming back.

Interesting note -- I remember when Microsoft used to ship the M editor with its C compiler package (I believe they did that up until 5.x or 6.x, at least before they switched to the Visual family of development tools). I was using Brief at the time (the best you could do on PC's in those days was microemacs), and liked it well enough, but was curious, so I switched to M.

M was a strange little editor. Completely programmable, and like Emacs, the command structure was more of a "memorize how we do it" kind of thing, rather than something that intuitively worked.

Soon after the discovery of the M editor, I went to work at Microsoft. I made an interesting discovery there -- the editor that was installed on by far the largest number of machines was -- wait for it -- vi. They had a PC port of vi (probably from Xenix), and it was installed as part of the standard set of Unix tools that went onto all PC's. (Yes, I understand that it's hard to believe that Microsoft developers had a set of Unix tools on their PC's, but in the early days, a lot of development was done on Xenix boxes and cross-compiled to MSDOS.) And in the test lab, where machines got completely wiped all the time, the only editor you could count on being there (other than that wonder of the modern world, EDLIN), was vi. So vi worked it's way into my fingers.

I tried many different text editors while I was there: Epsilon (a PC Emacs clone), M again, vi (for regular use, rather than just hit and run editing), and ended up settling on SlickEdit for the longest time.

When people were able to port the real Emacs to NT, I was tempted, but remember just how much configuration was needed before it was reasonable to use, so I stayed away.

Then I started using Linux as my main machine at home. At that point I jumped back in to the Emacs pool, and discovered that it was just as I remembered it. Somewhat clunky, but with a power that would amaze you. And my favorite bit, which isn't necessarily an emacs-only feature, was the keyboard macros. I've learned to do major repetitive textual restructuring with keyboard macros. I love it when someone who doesn't know what emacs can do comes up behind me when I'm doing my keyboard macro magic. They just can't believe what's happening.

To circle back to the original point of this post, if SubEthaEdit had keyboard macros, keyboard macros that were easy to create and then invoke, I would think seriously of switching to it as my main editor.

Someone needs to write an editor for windows that interacts with SubEthaEdit's Rendezvous stuff.

But I'll probably continue to use Emacs for the near future. It's an illness, I tell you.

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