Recently, I've been having to do a lot more work in just plain 'ol Unix at work. No X-server or anything. This literally means that on my Windows system, I have a Unix emulator (cygwin) where I SSH into the server on which I do some work. I recently wrote a Java program on my windows machine, FTP'ed it over and ran it. The problem was that any single error that I made, I had to fix on my machine, re-jar the program, FTP it back and then kill the running process to start the new one again.

So, I have started to look more into direct programming right there on the server that I access. I have been using nano thus far to do all my work, but frankly, it's not powerful enough for me to want to code in. So I've been working with the non-X version of emacs, where it FORCES you to learn the commands because there is no mouse support.

I...loved it. The code and I were much closer together where there was no GUI in the way or some fancy IDE. Emacs also has built in compilation support and the ability to run a program with just a few keystrokes. Heck, there is a full file browser, shell, and pretty much anything I'd need to program. It's a great feeling - to be free and one with the code.

I would not want to do Android coding with Emacs just because Eclipse makes the connection to the emulator easy, but for other things, I am learning C++ and Perl and how to use Emacs to become more productive.


KISS rules.