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by Vincent Foley.
Original Post: Poor choice of tools
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I was reading a report about the OpenBSD hackathon, and something Daniel Hartemei, the author of pf, the OpenBSD packet filter, said struck me as very odd:
He was working on a large AMD 64 laptop, displaying a simple screen managed by OpenBSD's default fvwm window manager, coding in a vi window with mutt open to the side. "I don't install much other software," he explained when I asked him about his working environment. "I have too many machines, and once you get used to something you need it everywhere. It's too much work getting things customized on all these machines."
Emphasis mine. This struck me as very, very odd coming from a developer. Why wouldn't he use Vim or Emacs instead of the very plain and normal nvi? Vim and Emacs (or another programmer's editor for that matter) provides you with a lot of features that make writing software faster and more pleasant. He's coding in C, so he could have the following benefits if he were using Emacs:
Auto indenting
Syntax highlighting
Integration with make
Integration with gdb
Etags
Custom-made commands
Auto indenting and syntax highlighting can often help detect syntax errors rapidly, such as a missing comma, a missing closing paren, an unclosed comment, etc. Integration with make means that you can run make directly from Emacs, and Emacs can parse the error messages, and you can go to the faulty lines. Etags means that it's easy to keep track of the functions in your different source files. And finally, custom-made commands, I have a lot of those, he could automate some processes (such as testing pf features). So hearing that he uses plain vi is very odd to me.
And I don't buy the "too much work to customize" argument; all my third-party elisp code for Emacs is in a directory called ~/.elisp, so all he'd have to do to have a working environment would be to scp his .emacs and his .elisp directory. That would give him a more pleasant and more productive environment.
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