>> Also one thing that has gone true in the last 15 years (but most devs seem to still ignore it), is that emacs now has a small footprint and starts fast compared to many IDEs.
I have started using emacs recently, coming from Eclipse, and this is the main point that has led me to it. I use a netbook at home with only 2gb of ram, and it absolutely takes forever to open up eclipse (even the most basic 'classic' eclipse install), to the point where I was dreading opening it up to start coding.
Another significant factor is that, when I started learning Scala and then Clojure, I noticed how dependent on the tooling I had become from using Eclipse in Java projects. For languages that do not have a mature set of tools favoring eclipse, than you're left with a really heavy and slow text editor. I noticed it was a terrible trade-off.
When I asked myself 'what programming environment is lightweight but goes beyong syntx highlight?', then it came down to emacs and vi, that I heard of. Since my particular interest was in lerning Clojure, emacs fit like a glove.
I'm still not really that productive, but in the long run I find that I'll gain a lot more from learning to hack in emacs.
You might also want to look into running emacs as a daemon, if you haven't already. Since it runs as a server in the background (with a grand total of maybe 30MB used in my case), clients pop up instantly and if there were buffers open on the server from before, they will remain open even if you close the client's window. If you start/close emacs more often, it's definitely a nice thing to have.
emacs --daemon
clients are called using either
emacsclient (for either terminal client or gtk/x11 client)
emacsclient -c (to open a new frame)
emacsclient -t (to open a frame in the current terminal)
Wow, I did not know that emacs could be run in a terminal mode like vim. Thought it was GTK/GUI only. No excuse not to install Evil and give it a shot now.
I have started using emacs recently, coming from Eclipse, and this is the main point that has led me to it. I use a netbook at home with only 2gb of ram, and it absolutely takes forever to open up eclipse (even the most basic 'classic' eclipse install), to the point where I was dreading opening it up to start coding.
Another significant factor is that, when I started learning Scala and then Clojure, I noticed how dependent on the tooling I had become from using Eclipse in Java projects. For languages that do not have a mature set of tools favoring eclipse, than you're left with a really heavy and slow text editor. I noticed it was a terrible trade-off.
When I asked myself 'what programming environment is lightweight but goes beyong syntx highlight?', then it came down to emacs and vi, that I heard of. Since my particular interest was in lerning Clojure, emacs fit like a glove.
I'm still not really that productive, but in the long run I find that I'll gain a lot more from learning to hack in emacs.