By the way, what exactly is so great about “the keyboard-only way of working”? Is it the speed of typing? I usually spend more time thinking about the problem than typing. Are some powerful features invoked by keyboard combos?
Speed, features and working well for many languages (i.e. people have written Emacs modes for most language).
Having everything on the keyboard means that you don’t have to do so many context switches (which are annoying and I find they can distrupt my train of though). As an example, in most word processors, bolding text with Shift+arrow keys then Ctrl+B is much much nicer than moving to the mouse, carefully selecting the text and then going up to the menu bar to click the little icon.
And Emacs has been around for decades, so there are hundreds of little (or not so little) packages that do anything and everything, e.g. editing a file via SSH transparently is pretty nice.
Having one environment for writing a LaTeX report, a Markdown file, a C, Haskell, Python or Shell (etc) program is nice because the basic shortcuts are the same and every environment is guaranteed to act how you expect, so, for example, doing a regex string replacement is the same process.
And on the note of keyboard combos, they are something that you end up learning by muscle memory, so it takes a little while but they become second nature, to the point of not being able to say what the shortcut is straight out, only able to work it out by actually doing the action.
(That said, Emacs/Vim isn’t for everyone: maybe it’s the time investment is too large, or it doesn’t really suit one’s way of working.)
Speed, features and working well for many languages (i.e. people have written Emacs modes for most language).
Having everything on the keyboard means that you don’t have to do so many context switches (which are annoying and I find they can distrupt my train of though). As an example, in most word processors, bolding text with
Shift+arrow keysthenCtrl+Bis much much nicer than moving to the mouse, carefully selecting the text and then going up to the menu bar to click the little icon.And Emacs has been around for decades, so there are hundreds of little (or not so little) packages that do anything and everything, e.g. editing a file via SSH transparently is pretty nice.
Having one environment for writing a LaTeX report, a Markdown file, a C, Haskell, Python or Shell (etc) program is nice because the basic shortcuts are the same and every environment is guaranteed to act how you expect, so, for example, doing a regex string replacement is the same process.
And on the note of keyboard combos, they are something that you end up learning by muscle memory, so it takes a little while but they become second nature, to the point of not being able to say what the shortcut is straight out, only able to work it out by actually doing the action.
(That said, Emacs/Vim isn’t for everyone: maybe it’s the time investment is too large, or it doesn’t really suit one’s way of working.)