Pete On Rails

I host this blog with RailsPlayground. Mostly, I never have to edit files on my hosted accounts, because I use robust deployment tools. However, today I had to tweak my .htaccess file and found that my shared host didn’t have “emacs”.

Alright. Are you kidding me? No emacs? I know that most of the younguns these days use “vi” or something else to edit on UNIX. And that’s FINE. “vi” is small (it fits on a floppy!) powerful, and a generally great editor.

I simply come from the old school. When I was in college, someone asked my CS101 professor: “Mr. Anastasio, is there another UNIX editor I could use for my homework other than emacs?”

His reply: “No. If you are going to work in software, emacs is THE editor.”

So I fired off this message to tech support:

I am loving the service so far. Very easy to set up and use.

HOWEVER! I was surprised to see that you don’t have emacs installed on your developer accounts.

Any chance of getting it installed?
I can use vi and other editors, but I’m a developer who comes from the “emacs is the only way” camp.

Thanks!

I kid you not. TEN minutes later, I got this reply:

Hello Peter,

This is now installed on your server.

Note that your account is on a shared server, so if you try to copy very large
files it can use a lot of swap and memory space on the server. So if there are
any issues, we will be forced to disable it.

Aside from not understanding how I might copy large files with emacs and run the server out of RAM, I think this is a GREAT answer.

Thanks RailsPlayground!

If you are looking for a good Rails host, I suggest you read this article.