The question is what to write html in… on slashdot. Where hairy unix geeks go when they are not chilling at alt.sysadmin.recovery.

Someone mentioned notepad there. Silly person.

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE’s and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this – no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

Notepad is not only a useless HTML editor, it’s a useless text editor. Use a real one and you’ll see the virtue of this argument.

EMACS or vi on a decent Unix/linux workstation is your IDE. I challenge any web developer to keep up with me in site design and updating. You might be able to stay with me on a trivial site with a couple of pages/templates, but I guarantee you that as soon as you start working on anything non-trivial (like the 100,000+ static documents I currently administer), a real text editor and the basic set of *nix utilities will leave any IDE looking weak and impoverished.

via Ask Slashdot: Web Site Editing Software For the Long Haul? – Slashdot.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, emacs is a useful front for ESS, which allows me to run R. Most of the time I write scripts in nano.

But I’m not programming large amounts of css, html, or (worse) C. If I was, I would live inside emacs.