Some of the things I do regularly:

• vi/emacs: filter parts of the edit buffer through commands (perl one liners, tools like fmt(1), specialized little tools for building indexes, cross-references, and the like ...)
• vi/emacs: map a key to the compile command (or the respective vi macro) to run Makefile entries that do compilation, testing, publishing to web sites, ...
• emacs: use the shell mode to record all your activities, e.g., when working as root on other's machines, or when doing a new installation routine, ...
• vi/emacs: make the editor put in templates for common tasks
• vim/emacs: develop your own, intelligent (for you) syntax colouring scheme
• emacs: use the editor as shell substitution on platforms where you have no convenient shell (command line history, ...)

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

inoremap <C-P>slurp @array=do{local @ARGV=$file;<>};<CR>
[download]

• dabbrev (defaults to M-/): dynamic abbreviations which lets you pick the really long but insightful variable names because you don't have to type them anymore.
• M-x locate so you'll never do the locate in xterm and mark the filename with the mouse again (later pasting that filename into XEmacs anyway)
• speedbar one of the finest tools for navigation in large projects I've ever come across
• desktop for re-opening all the files on the next day
• active-menu.el (see the website) for one more line of code
• function-menu for another navigation mechanism which works only in the current buffer (a buffer is usually a representation of a file in the editor)
• saveplace to find myself at exactly the cursor position as the last time I opened that file
• cperl auto help shows a short syntactic information; good if it has been a while since your last perl programm
• and thousands of other things that don't spring to my mind in this moment

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion

First of all, an editor needs a clipboard. I've learned the necessary tricks for Windows, pico and vi :

• For Windows, it's CTRL-C, CTRL-V and CTRL-X
• For pico, it's CTRL-K to erase a line and CTRL-U to paste a set of lines
• For vi, it's dd to erase a line and p to paste it.

The second nice-to-have thing is the ability to replay keystrokes. pico has no such capability, vi has limited capability by prefixing the number of repetitions to a single command, and the Borland IDEs and proton have that capability. notepad lacks that capability. D'oh.

Syntax highlighting is nice eye-candy that helps immensely when doing some TeX stuff. Both, proton and nedit do that.

Being able to read (and maybe write) both, Unix and DOS line endings is a sure plus, but not really necessary, as I can convert stuff using Perl anyway.

vi and emacs both have named registers that you can use to store and recall text. I don't know how to use vi but I know they're there.
• emacs does really beautiful rectangle cuts and pastes.
• emacs does cuts, copies and appends to regisers.
• emacs does cuts copies and appends to other buffers.
• emacs lets you treat a register as a variable that you can increment and decremt and use it's value in keyboard macros.
• emacs lets you write extra functions in lisp (if you want to)
• emacs lets you record keyboard macros. either one time quick hacks or you can name them and bind them to a key. just for this session or make them permenant.
emacs does lots of other wonderful things that I can't/haven't figured out how to do in vi. emacs figures out the line ending and uses it transparently, if it gets it wrong you can override it.

Nuance

nuance: "vi and emacs both have named registers that you can use to store and recall text. I don't know how to use vi but I know they're there."

Hitting the double quote in command mode tells vi that the next letter you enter is going to be the name of the buffer that you'll be refering to. For instance:

"aD

will cut everything from the cursor to the end of the line, and throw it in buffer a. To paste it in again, you'd say:

"ap

The :map command binds a key to a macro... like so:

:map q xp

which will make the q key cut the letter the cursor's presently on and paste it after the next one, effectively transposing them.

Some of the other things you mention make me think. It's about time I went back and learned some more stuff, to make my editing more pleasant. It's easy to just roll along after a certain point, using what you know.