Text Editor for Linux 3411

Jove, is of course just another emacs, which proves my point.

In 1985 I'd been using an emacs editor for a few years too. I switched to MicroEmacs for a few years in the mid-late 80's under Unix, because source code was available and I could compile it to my requirements on any platform. When Linux came along in the early 90's I started using GNU Emacs and shortly switched to XEmacs, which I've used for over a decade now.

Of course... there were actually a few *nice* things about the first emacs that I used (Perfect Writer for CP-M). And through all of the variations of emacs that I've used... my ^A and ^E commandsstillgo up the page or down the page respectively if the cursor is already at the beginning or end of line. :-) Worse, I use two aliases... the one that invokes gnuclient under X is "em", but the one for a non-X terminal is... "pw". Old habits, when they are useful, die hard...

You have no way to know what features you'll need next year, or the year after. If you choose a fully featured editor it won't become obsolete (in fact, it is unlikely you'll ever come close to learning anything close to what it can do).

But while there is *no* harm from having an editor that can do things you don't need done; it is ridiculous to intentionally choose an editor that will force you to go through the learning process all over again.

As you can imagine, since I've been using the same key bindings for over 20 years, most of the finger movements I do while editing require no "brains" farther up my arm than my wrist. (Which can, however, cause some hilarious typos... I've been known to position my fingers one key off, and retype the same typo three times using the brainlessness of my fingers, before the message gets close enough to grey matter to register that something isn't right!)

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