Do text editors *have* to suck?

Something I was thinking about this past week - the tools we use as programmers. Specifically, I was thinking about the all-important text editor.

When I started out programming, I would just use whatever was around. In DOS, it was EDIT.EXE. In Windows, I began with Notepad then proceeded to try a million different other things until settling on Notepad++ most of the time. I've used Eclipse quite a bit, but that's so much more than an editor, and while I liked it I found it far too heavy for my usual day-to-day work.

In parallel with my progression in M$-land I've led a second life extensively using Linux and Solaris (and other *nix-en). When I started in 1996 or so I think my primary text editor was pico... which I found after being baffled by vi, finding ed useless, and completely unable to figure out emacs. I eventually found joe and was happy for a year or two, until college.

In college we received cheat-sheets for vim and emacs, and both were still quite intimidating to me, so I continued to use joe, even compiling it in my home directory on systems where it was unavailable. However at this time I found myself beginning to hit joe's limitations and realized I had to bite the bullet.

I was still afraid of emacs, so I've been a vim user ever since.

So, here I am, ten years later, still using vim, and here's the part I hate: I've never mastered it.

I have memory-mapped all the common keystrokes for moving around a file, searching, replacing, mark, cut, paste, etc... but for anything else I need to consult a cheat sheet. This feels like a a failure on my part...

There are features I see emacs users have that I want *desperately* yet they feel out of reach in vim. Sure, vim can do some of them, split-pane editing, multiple files open at once, cutting and pasting between them, macros, shells, compiler/interpreter/debugger integration but all of this seems to never work the way I want it to.

I've ignored the elephant (gnu?) in the room for all this time: emacs. So, in the last year I made up my mind that I *must* learn to use emacs, at least as well as I do vim, and this week I did all my non-work hacking in emacs.

You know what I'm beginning to believe?

EVERY TEXT EDITOR SUCKS IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

Yes, emacs is ultimately customizable. In fact, I've spent more time this week writing elisp than I have Perl, and yet, I'm still dissatisfied. Countless searches on Google have showed me that most people eventually give up fighting its quirks and just settle.

I have to admit, I'm beginning to get comfortable with all the keystroke-combinations, and the macros and slowly figuring out how to customize various things to my liking...

And of course, there's one more big problem: vim (or at least vi) is installed *everywhere* and I spend most of my time working on remote servers. Sure, I have root on most of them, but that's no reason to start installing things just because I feel like it.

Also, emacs seems to be quite a different beast running in an xterm over ssh, whereas vim remains the same.

I'm torn and frustrated. I need the best of both worlds and I need to figure out how to get them before I begin an epic yak shaving expedition that will ultimately suck my life away.

Maybe I'm just writing this to vent. Yes, that's probably it. Maybe in another few weeks I'll be singing the praises of emacs. Maybe I'll return to the relative comfort of vim.

If anybody reading this has tips for a reasonably-intelligent Perl hacker who just wants to get more out of his editor without moving heaven and earth and re-mapping every key-stroke to custom macros, please, please help!!!