Re: Efforts to attract more users?

[Stuart Hacking <stuhacking@gmail.com>]

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On 8 July 2010 08:44, <joakim@verona.se> wrote:
>
> I dont know of any organized effort.
>
> I do try to attract people to Emacs and free software myself.
>

 I think Emacs becomes very alluring when someone gets stuck on a laborious
piece of text processing or searching. I've introduced a couple of people in
work to it simply by virtue of regexp incremental search and keyboard
macros. Now they're converts.

I mostly work with developers that use a windoze desktop, Eclipse, and
> some secondary simpler editor. In recent years getting people interested
> in Emacs has been difficult, I can only recall about one or two people I
> helped getting started with Emacs the last 3 years.
>

It's hard to come up with persuasive arguments for emacs in the face of
shiny new development environments. I suppose things like drag and drop
refactoring and graphical editors (property lists, forms, tree based xml)
are popular. Is this a by product of Eclipse being quite difficult and
cumbersome when you try to search for something?

At home I use Emacs and JDE with Tags. In work I use Eclipse because it's
the done thing. I often find myself copying large chunks of text into emacs
to work with, then copying them back.

As I mentioned, Emacs earns its stripes when people discover the joys of
automating away the drudgery and then explore the other things they can do.
Whenever I mention emacs to anyone though, I'm met with either a blank stare
or "Hah, Emacs. Nice operating system, shame about the editor.", "Emacs?
Eight megs and constantly swapping!"

Just try it, friend. It's eight megs well spent.

--Stuart

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