When I was in college I had the privilege to work on a project with a developer that understood emacs as on operating system and used it as a way of life. When we started the project he would yell at me whenever I took my hand off the keyboard and tried to use the mouse. Finally he started to hit my hand with a ruler when I would lift it up.
My emacs skills are still probably only 1% of his, but after working that short time with him I have never been able to fully feel comfortable using textmate or sublime text. I always come back to emacs, even though the learning curve even years later is still there. Just feels like the right tool to me.
On the first day of my first CS class in college, the gruff old professor passed around a stack of photocopied "VI TUTORIAL" papers. In the "MOVEMENT" section, it had pictures of arrow keys, then X's hand-drawn over top of each arrow key, and H J K L handwritten above their corresponding X'd out arrow keys.
Gruff old professor explained that using H J K L was the True and Proper Way and the arrow keys were a work of the Devil, so to make sure we were not tempted by the Dark Lord of cursor motion, he had the department's system administrator recompile vi on the department's (pathetically overworked) Sun to remove support for the arrow keys.
(As an aside, if you've never tried working interactively on a Unix box whose load is higher than its CPU speed in MHz, you've really missed out.)
Rather than get used to using H J K L, I spent that evening waiting for a new vi executable to build in my home directory.
> Rather than get used to using H J K L, I spent that evening waiting for a new vi executable to build in my home directory.
>Laziness will find a way.
Doesn't sound like laziness as much as it sounds like the thinking of an obstinate youngster who secretly is uneasy with learning new things.
My emacs skills are still probably only 1% of his, but after working that short time with him I have never been able to fully feel comfortable using textmate or sublime text. I always come back to emacs, even though the learning curve even years later is still there. Just feels like the right tool to me.