Warning: The geek content in the post is extremely high. If you are not [E---,E+++] or have no idea what that means, perhaps you should stop with just looking at the pretty train.
The morning started out as most do during the week. Up out of bed, into the bathroom to cover the 3 S's and brush the teeth, followed by a zap in the shower, some breakfast and onto the commute to work.
Once in the office, I had to roll down to the kitchen to grab some health food before I talked to Neil about some photography. Shortly, Karen stopped by and asked for some help getting a automatic test to function. Since Karen is pretty easy to look at and I'm very familiar with what she's testing, I wandered down to her candy filled office to help her out.
Normally, I let people pilot their own rig and play advocate of the answer and just ask questions, but we ran into a communication problem where I needed to clarify through keyboard entry. Immediately the problem became very, very clear.
You see, Karen resides on that side of the *NIX world that uses the editor knows as emacs whereas I am a user of vi, or at least it's upgraded cousin. The results were disasterous!
The escape sequence to escape insert mode doesn't sit well with the other editor. As a matter of fact, most emacs users should disable the esc key altogether in order to avoid a random vi user from opening up secrert windows and overwriting buffers. I felt like a new driver learning to drive a manual transmission. I couldn't get anything done!
I was surprised. I was originally introduced to emacs in school as a replacement to the university standard pico editor. I loved the flexibility, which I now recognize as bloatedness, of the editor, and became rather good bending it to my will. I participated in a good deal of vi vs emacs discussions, and I had a glove thrown down. For a month we would only use the other side's editor, and that was one long January. I diligently researched into the cryptic : commands, spending more time looking through the Vim Reference than actually writing code. Getting used to hitting a single key to do things was a bit disorienting, but after some time the editor grew on me. I was amazed at how much quicker I could get things done, not because emacs did not have the same functionality, but because the way vi did it, made sense.
Where I was shocked, is that when placed back infront of the Extensible Macro System, I was locked right up. I couldn't even pull out the C-x C-s required to write some stuff to the disk. Furthermore, my dependence on vi's modes littered the code with which I was working with all sorts of: :w and :!make install. I felt like a fish out of water.
The argument about which editor is better is older than the world wide web, and will probably never die. Although in doing a little research, I did find this article that makes a great case for both editors, and tells you when each is applicable. Since I write code, and not novels for a living, I'll stick with the better editor 
