![]() If you fit into one of the typing-centric categories however it MAY be worth your while. If all that you do is type up an essay now and again or write up your grocery list, you're just not going to get a very good return on your investment. I absolutely love these editors, but that's because as a programmer I'm often doing complicated reformatting, refactoring, editing dozens of files at a time, and testing code alongside it. First, if you're not a programmer, writer, or typist, I'd say it's probably just not worth the effort. This post isn't to tell you which editor to use, I'd sooner help you decide whether you should bother learning one at all. It became really fun actually to find new tricks and improve my expertise, and now I consider myself something of a Guru in my editor of choice (though I still have endless amounts to learn). Granted, all this thought and consideration often caused me to take an hour or so to figure out something that saved me a total of 30 seconds but in that hour I'd also learn 2 or 3 other tricks that would also save me 30 seconds each time I used them. The customization quickly became an addiction, I'd think constantly about how I could improve my work-flow or shave a few keystrokes off of a task I do often. ![]() My car doesn't let me record a macro of me backing out of my driveway, (probably a good thing), I can't easily get my web-browser to load specific sites dependent on the time of day, heck I can't even change most keyboard shortcuts in my OS. ![]() In fact, thinking of it now I can't come up with a single other system that I use that offers this level of highly accessible customization. It wasn't long before I had the basics down, and I realized that having something so amazingly customizable was really an amazing thing. I felt pretty much useless and slow at first, but held to my stubbornness and waited it out. One thing is for certain, learning a new system definitely changes the way you approach data entry. Nonetheless I picked one and started spending some time with it. Unfortunately though, due to the holy war it's nearly impossible to get any sort of objective assessment of the pros and cons of each editor. I don't particularly care what anyone else uses as long as I'm content and efficient with what I have. Personally I've never been interested in participating in fanboy-ism. After a short period of watching some videos and reading a thing or two I quickly uncovered the presence of the everlasting holy war between Emacs and Vi users. I started researching the best editor to learn, there're hundreds out there, and most shortcuts and advanced techniques tend to be non-transferable (at least among the more complex editors). However, if I can spend a few hours here and there to save myself countless hours throughout my career, it doesn't take complex mental math to see that it's a worthwhile thing to do. These posts all came with the disclaimer that it would take time, effort, and that learning something new would slow me down at the start. Somewhere on the vastness of the internet I read that learning how to properly use a text editor (or, how to use a proper editor) would not only help me type faster, but also that being able to get what's in my head onto the screen efficiently would help keep me focused on the task at hand. So about a year ago I realized that as someone going into Computer Science as a career I would be typing for the rest of my life.
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