Emacs – text editor on steroids

Although it has been a round for quite some time, I’m not a coder so my experience with text editors and IDEs is very limited. To give you an example, I’ve been using on the command line the good-ol’ simple nano. But, since I’m starting to need a bit more powerful features, my search began for a more powerful program.

Emacs was my first try since it has been highly rated and praised. For me, there was a bit of a learning curve for the simple operations of navigating through a file (keyboard shortcuts are awesome) but nothing overly complicated and there is a nice tour accessible when you open the program.

My usage so far has been to compare and diff a file, but soon I’ll also encounter tasks such as merge and simple code debugging. Again, I’m not a coder so this tool right now might be an overkill but who knows in the future… better get myself familiar from the start with a nice program than having to learn again something new later.