Switching from vim to emacs

I decided to try emacs as the editor for all development work primarily because i was not able to find a proper source code taging system that worked with vim properly. ctags supported tag completion but lacked function reference support. Whereas cscope lacked tag completion. What motivated me to switch to emacs was the global source code tag system. vim editor's support for global is partial. vim editor needs source code changes to add a new tag file format. Another motivating factor was the ability to debug the code in the editor. That helps to use the source tag system to read code while you are in a debug session.

Now about the good and bad part of the switch. emacs key binding is really really painful. Literally, it hurts your arm if you keep using the default keybinding. I was also comfortable with vim like key binding where i had the ESC mode to give editor command and insert mode to edit. The solution was to use viper. Good part, I really like the integration with global. Being able to search with normal editor commands in the search result window is really nice. Also I now have tag completion and function reference support. (But i had to patch global to get some of the required features. Will do another blog post on that). Integration with gdb is really great. In the graphics mode i can have multiple windows showing different debugger details like register dump, stack frame etc.

Another thing that came in as a bonus is ability to extend editor features with a proper programming language. Though that was not a motivating factor for the switch, i now really like the fact that i can extend emacs using elisp.

So all in all i am happy with the switch.