2008-02-15 emacs again

During the past few days I played around with emacs. And it turned out I don't like it. Why? Because it's completely and utterly antiquated. There are "hotkeys" to simulate the arrow keys. A couple of centuries ago, not every terminal had arrow keys. So the maintainers of emacs find it necessary to cover these cases. They also believe that "it is faster to use these control keys than move your hand over to the arrow keys" (!). For example, CTRL+f (or C-f, in emacs lingo), does exactly the same thing as the right-arrow key.

There are some good things in emacs, of course. It's completely re-programmable. You can change the whole menu and basically everything you can think of. And it comes with lisp in the trunk. The programming language, not the speech impediment.
Lisp. Created in 1958, it is the second-oldest programming language that's still alive and kicking. Only Fortran is older. Now I have no idea about lisp, because I didn't come across it in real life yet. So I don't have the right to make a judgment. But on the other hand, I didn't come across it in real life yet. And I've seen a few programming languages in my life. (Sounds like I'm eighty years old, doesn't it?) So how relevant can lisp be? It might be of high academical value (proving algorithms correct and stuff), and it might help to learn how to think. But is it really the best possible language to customize a text editor?

I'd rather use Notepad++ in Windows, and gedit or nano in Unix. Unfortunately, none of them has the butterfly command...