Brief was just superb. The column copy and macros were so useful.
I agree, vi was an absolute pain, Emacs wasn't much better either.
Mike.
I first programmed in the Turbo Pascal 3 editor, which IIRC was based on WordStar. Later versions spiced up the editor a lot, with menus, built-in debugging, and so on.
In university we had emacs on the main computers so that's what I used. Getting into it damn near broke my mind but once I'd learned what it could do there was no turning back. I understand vi is also very powerful but I only learned it because it's always there (on *nix, anyway).
After getting used to the admittedly odd (but very consistent) command syntax I have just never been satisfied with anything else. Even when I need a certain IDE's other features for something, I edit the files in emacs. I hate mousing when I'm editing.
A good example would be the MPLAB IDE, which I just downloaded yesterday to check out. Overall it seems pretty powerful--about like the old Turbo Pascal 5/Turbo C IDE (except not text-mode) with the programmer interfaces added on. The MPLAB IDE editor, however, is abysmal, with limited hotkey support and a useless macro function. When I get into PICs I may need to use MPLAB (if I can't get sdcc to work) but there is no way I'm using that horrible editor.
That was just a very windy way of saying that yeah, emacs is a pain in the butt to learn, but man oh man...once you do, it's insane. I guess vi is the same for vi fans but I just learned emacs first. And my fingers still speak Wordstar but its limitations are ultimately frustrating.
Torben