Friday Hacks #146, January 19
Posted on by Julius
Hey Hackers, Friday Hacks is back again to kick-start the semester! What better way to start the semester than to learn about productivity hacks! We’ll attempt to tackle the age-old question: Vim or Emacs?
Our very own Jethro and Herbert will be sharing with us some ways that Emacs or Vim has made them more productive. Attend the talk to know more!
Date/Time: Friday, January 19 at 7:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3, NUS School of Computing (COM1-0212)
Editor War: Vim
Talk Description:
Vim is a powerful text editor available in most Unix/Linux machines. It is an extended version of the vi editor, with many additional features designed to be helpful in editing program source code. Like vi, it is a modal editor: it operates in different modes, such as insert mode, normal mode, or visual mode. There are many plugins available for Vim that extends or add new functionality to Vim. Some notable programmers that use Vim are Larry Wall who created the Perl programming language, Paul Graham, and Charlie Cheever, the co-founder of Quora.
Speaker Profile
Herbert is a Year 3 Computer Science student who has been using vim for 2 years. It has made him more productive because of all the mnemonical shortcuts as well as plugins that made doing a lot of things easier.
Editor War: Emacs
Talk Description:
Emacs is a text editor that is characterized by its extensibility. Emacs has over 10,000 built-in commands and its user interface allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Emacs uses its own dialect of lisp called Emacs Lisp, which is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs. Some notable programmers that use emacs are Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum who created the Python programming language, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker Profile
Jethro is a Year 2 Computer Science student who has been using Emacs for about 2 years now. He previously used vim for 5 years but made the switch because he says he is as good as his tools and he reached a point where vim doesn’t cut it anymore.