I personally havent really used emacs for organizing, but I really like it for bash coding and writing software documenation in orgmode. I am even starting to get a little bit comfortable at writing my .emacs file but at some point I will have to do a lot of reorganizing and updating and I kind of dont want to do it (I still use .emacs and not emacs.d/init.el and all keybindings still use the legacy global-set-key command).
Apart from the work I am putting into it it is really great, because when I actually get to do stuff I can do so with great efficency. I am even starting to miss my emacs keybinds when not using emacs (especially ctrl-k for killing from your cursor position to the end of the line ctrl-a for jumping to the beginning of a line and ctrl-e for jumping to the end of a line). At this point when I am writing stuff in emacs (as example working on a bash script) I at maximum use my mouse for scrolling.
Fuck, I really did turn into the meme (and I am not even using it for longer than 4-5 months at maximum)___
Vim and emacs are really worth it when you do a lot of writing and editing (whether it be code or text). If you only occasionally edit config files nano is completely fine. However I do recommend to learn stuff like exiting and saving in vim because no matter what, about every single distro has some form of vim so you might encounter it in imporant scenarios and then you know your way around.
I have, in the past, recommended, if you use Unix systems in a technical way, knowing at least how to do the following in vi (and I use emacs):
Close the program, discarding changes. From vim's command mode,
: q ! RET.Exit writing changes. From vim's command mode,
: w q RET.Move the cursor around. Today, usually you can get by with arrow keys -- I haven't been on a system where one thing or another was dicked up in a way that rendered arrow keys unusable in many years, but from Vim's command mode, "h", "j", "k", and ""l.
Enter insert mode to Insert text. From vim's command mode, "i".
Exit insert mode. From vim's insert mode, ESC.
Search for text. From vim's command mode, "/", the text to search for, and RET.
Replace text. From vim's command mode, ":%s/foo/bar/g" to change all instances of foo to bar in a given file.
If you've got that much and you ever find yourself on a system that only has vi available (and it may not be vim), you can at least do the basics.
But the widespread deployment of
nanohas made learning basic vi less important than was once the case. Even very small systems that I've run into tend to havenano.Note that busybox, a popular statically-linked shell often used in a rescue-the-horribly-broken-system scenario, does not have nano but does have a minimal "vi"-alike, so you might still want to know vi in that case.
Thats exactly the kind of stuff I meant.