I’ve always kept emacs around for heavy text lifting. It’s always sitting open on my desktop and stuff I’m working on gets cut into and out of it all the time. The keyboard macros alone are enough for that.

That being said, I haven’t used it as my primary code editor in a very long time. I’ve been doing a lot of GUI work, and emacs isn’t really cut out for that. Add in the refactoring support that most modern IDEs and I’ve been quite willing to leave most of the work to another program.

Now that I’m doing a lot more in rails, I find that I’m in emacs more and more. I’ve dumped all of the other editors and i just spend all of my time in emacs. I’m using emacs-rails which is a minor mode that ties together the ruby major mode along with a snippet editor, links to generation and migration methods, easy and smart navigation (as in jump straight to the correct controller or helper), and lots of little things I haven’t got around to playing with yet.

On top of that, I get to keep all of the keyboard shortcuts that I’ve already learned.

I’m going to post more about emacs in future posts. I’ll probably show some parts of my .emacs file as well.