Deterministic Navigation, or, Learning from Vim

Recently I had the excellent opportunity to hang out and talk shop with Kyle Wild about the state of Computer Science, CS education, and software development environments. While the former are discussions for later posts, the latter will be part of a series elucidating the good parts of Emacs and Vim.

Parties on both sides of the holy war seem to get more distracted with partisan bickering than figuring out how to best get the code out of your head and into a computer. As an Emacs programmer, I’m interested in how I can incorporate the useful bits of Vim. Kyle, coming from the Vim world, wanted to more clearly understand the pros and cons of using one IDE over another before investing the time required to make the switch. However you currently code, I suggest looking over the shoulder of a friend using a different IDE – you’re bound to learn something.