From: Bob Stout 

On 20 Nov 2003 CHARLES.ANGELICH!1.123.140.0{at}filegate.net wrote:

> My preference is still Qedit and I drop to DOS frequently to avoid
> Windows editors and use Qedit macros to speed things up. I'm used to it
> and can get more done in less time that way. :-)

There was an excellent article about 10 years ago in one of the programming
magazines with a baby duck (or was it a chicken?) on the cover. The article
started out talking about the baby duck syndrome, stating that the first
living thing a baby duck sees, it assumes to be its mother. The parallel
drawn in the article is that programmers are much the same about their
editors. Whatever, you first become proficient with, is the one you will
prefer for the rest of your life or career - whichever comes first.

I cut my teeth on minis and superminis and the one common denominator was
Emacs. Back in the back of my office, I have three different sizes of
floppies, tape reels, and tape cartridges, each containing EEL code so that
I could make Emacs on VMS, Primos, Unix, or whatever work identically on
whatever system I was using, within the limits of the VT-100/220 terminals
I normally worked at.

So it was natural that when I moved to PC's, although I played around with
Qedit and a few others, I never felt comfortable until I bought my first
copy of Epsilon. The only difference between Epsilon and classic Emacs is
that Epsilon's EEL is a dialect of C rather than LISP, which was fine with
me. I think I started out with Epsilon 3, and just upgraded to Epsilon 12.
If/when I use DOS, the Epsilon distribution CD-ROM comes with versions for
DOS, Win32, Linux, and BSD, so I still never have to retrain my fingers.

> When in Windows I use EditPad (notepad replacement) for most text files.
> Word is overkill and seems to fight writing plain text although it can
> if you force it.

Force is the right word. Besides which, it can't do context sensitive
highlighting and auto indentation like most good programmer's editors.
Epsilon, for example, supports automatic modes for ASM, batch, C, C++, C#,
configuration files, GAMS, HTML, XML, PHP, Ini, makefile, Perl, PostScript,
Python, shell, TeX, VHDL, & VB. I don't actually use all of them, but
it's still nice to know they're there.

> I have Dreamweaver here for HTML. I don't normally do any javascript but
> when I do I do that in Dreamweaver as well.

I always use PHP rather than JS, and I always use Epsilon for HTML &
PHP. The only thing that it lacks for the task is a spell checker, but
there's EEL code available for integrating Epsilon and MicroSpell (which I
normally use under Win32) or various other spell checkers (for other
platforms).

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