When I tell people I meet that I am a PHP developer, it’s not too unusual for them to scoff or even laugh. In spite of PHP’s enormous popularity, its unflinching support by the unstoppable Facebook engineering machine, and its continuous and impressive improvement as a language year after year, many people in the software industry are openly derisive toward PHP.

Don’t let PHP’s own reputation sully yours; don’t let PHP itself typecast you.

In television, film, and theatre, typecasting is the process by which a particular actor becomes strongly identified with a specific character; one or more particular roles; or, characters having the same traits or coming from the same social or ethnic groups.

Wikipedia, “Typecasting (Acting)”

You are more than the language you use, or even prefer. Moreover, the language you use usually has very little to do with your success as an engineer, or even the success of any business using it. Let me give you some advice.

Yes, my friends, it is true. After more than fifteen years using Vim, teaching Vim, proselytizing about Vim, all the while scoffing in the general direction of Emacs, I’ve seen the light. The light of Lisp… Or something.

If, like me, you’re curious enough to give Emacs a try, this post should help you get off the ground.

It’s taken me at least the fourteen days described in the title, but with my help it should only take you two or three. There are some things to get used to, some new paradigms, and you have to learn a bit of Lisp (Elisp, actually), but don’t be afraid, it’s not that hard.

It would be safe to say that I’m a Vim devotee; a follower. I own more than one t-shirt with Vim “stuff” on it (one bearing its logo, another the image of “HJKL” key caps). I’ve spoken at local Vim meetups, I subscribe to Vim-related lists, I’ve casually urged people to switch from Sublime Text to Vim at the office and a few actually did.

For me, saying that I use Emacs or, heaven forbid, advertising it through wardrobe choices, feels like an act of high treason.

Still, it is true. I’ve been secretly using Emacs for the past few months, exclusively. I have told a few people at work and all of them, without exception, literally gasped. That’s how broadly I had advertised my love of Vim. But it’s time now to explain why I switched and why you should think about switching, too.

The “toolbox” metaphor often used to describe a programmer’s knowledge, favorite software, shell scripting tricks, and so on, is a convenient one. The skills and utilities that a seasoned programmer brings to bear on any given problem is much the same as the craftsman’s physical collection of implements; selected carefully, representative of the craftsman’s preferences, and wielded with precision borne from experience.

We can learn much from these parallel concepts. In the same way that a builder must keep the blade of the saw sharp, so must a programmer focus some effort on sharpening the “blades” of his or her tools and techniques. This is not a post about education or learning new algorithms or solving ridiculous code katas every day. This is a story about chainsaws.

Vim’s registers are incredibly powerful. You use them all the time when you yank and put text or record macros, but are you using CTRL-R (in insert mode)? If you aren’t, you’re missing out on a huge efficiency boost! I will show you what CTRL-R does and how it can make you faster and give you even more uses for Vim’s registers.