I haven’t said it here before, but I feel I really should. I’ve been an avid emacs user since I started to learn it back in 1991 on emacs 18. I worked at IBM with their RS/6000 machines at the time and I learned C on AIX with emacs as my editor.

To me there was no alternative at that time and I soon learned all the quirks, got used to things and appreciated all the beautiful parts – my fellow colleagues being emacs fans of course helped pushing me into that team. For the fun of it, I’ve checked when vim was started and I’ve learned that it got available for “unix” in 1992. And it probably was quite far away from a real emacs competitor at that time. The vi editor was of course there, but it had no C syntax indent support and it used and still uses that quirky “mode” approach that I’ve never liked.

I came from hacking the C64 to programming Amiga over to AIX and I was used to and liked full-screen editors without any particular mode switching necessary. Still today I find it a bit curious how vi (in the shape of vim) can be this popular given that (in my view) funny concept.

While I do see some of the benefits of XEmacs over GNU Emacs I always disable all menus, icons and toolbars so to me in real-life editing the differences don’t mean a lot, so I tend to go with the plain GNU Emacs.

So, I’ve pretty much used Emacs just about daily at work and in my spare time hacking since then. Even during the few times I’ve been locked in at a windows desktop I’ve managed to get a windows version installed to survive my days!

Thank you emacs team!