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I started programming when I was 14 years old. My first language was Visual Basic 6, I've had a lot of exposure to html, dhtml and javascript, but until Visual Basic I thought that those "exe" files on windows where something like an special html file (I even tried to change the extension to some web pages)

Anyway, some time passed and discovered Perl and made my first "dynamic web page", circa 1999, I was 16 y/o and, my hosting provider was hostway and the best I could do for "database" where some plain text files and some perl programs I wrote.

Regular expressions where those strange strings I found sometimes and that made some strange magic to validate emails and things like that.

One day I discovered this great text editor, it was called Editplus (http://www.editplus.com/) I started using it for everything, it had this search&replace function that worked that magic and with some researching I finally founded out what was a regular expression.

The time went on, I migrated from Windows to Linux, and then, one day browsing somewhere, I learned about emacs and the emacs vs vi war. I started learning emacs, and then I understood everything.

Turns out that when you are under Windows, you don't really understand the power of a terminal and why would you need a simple (yet powerful) text editor.

You have those amazing IDEs (eclipse, Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, you name it) that helps you edit files, find files and make you feel your life is easy.

Then one day, you learn about emacs, and suddenly you find out how to make an emacs extension, how to record a keyboard command, and one day, you end up a whole day programming on emacs on the terminal. One day you ssh to a remote server, and work from there without feeling any lag, without missing anything from a common IDE.

Turns out, that if you're using Windows, you simply can't enjoy the power of emacs and the terminal, thous, you don't understand what's all the fuzz around emacs-linux-terminal-git-etc...