Text Editor Nonsense

Do you fellow /prog/riders actually use the advanced features of your text editor? I can use both Vim and Emacs comfortably at this point, but really all I ever end up doing is customizing the colors and the keys to split windows / make tabs. I only ever use Vim macros as sort of mass text morphing scripts, like adding a random number at the end of every line, but I never really encounter a scenario where a macro would make programming much easier.

Most of the time if I'm programming I'm too occupied thinking about the program itself to try to think up clever ways to use the editor.

What are some cases where you've actually used an advanced feature of your editor; like macros, to aid in your programming?

I use Emacs, and must shamefully admit that I have come to use some ``advanced features'' of it. First off, I some of the usual fare of IDO mode (must have), eshell, undo-tree, some find-grep thing, a slightly modified dirtree, simple prepackaged functionality functionality in general. Some keyboard shortcuts for this and that, but that would be the baseline.

Then come other modes. I of course use paredit, nrepl and its IDEish functionality, and a host of other little commands for Clojure code. I came to make a skeleton I needed for org-mode, but I certainly don't use all of its functionality, not even a significant subset.

I made the rather large effort to become accustomed to Emacs' VC facilities, which are powerful and useful, but require the memorization of many arbitrary shortcuts.

When I need to transmogrify text as basically data, I use Vim or spreadsheet.

I'm still not sure if I'd recommend learning these editors to someone without a specific use case for them. If you use Lisp, or C, or L^AT_EX a lot, then Emacs is a natural choice. When working over SSH, you have little choice but Vim. Otherwise, I see little point in taking the plunge and learning them, it's not like they'll actually make you a better programmer.