Re: Failing to see the allure of Emacs

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Daniel <unagimiyagi@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I started learning emacs 48 hours ago.  The motivation for this was to
> be able to do programming and general computing tasks through just
> emacs.  I've seen the wizards who are just doing all kinds of crazy
> stuff--quickly.  I am not sure what the benefit is now, though, after
> going through the tutorial.
>
> Yes, I can edit text files and python files and java files no
> problem.  And I have no doubt that I'll get faster. But I thought that
> I would never have to leave the emacs terminal window.
>
> So much of daily computing for anyone consists of pdfs, word, excel
> documents, gmail, itunes, file browsing, etc.  So I still have to
> switch to the gui to do these things.

Emacs views PDFs (and if you don't like how it does that, it is easy to
start a viewer from within Emacs, from the minibuffer, a shell window,
an Emacs shell or a number of modes from source files that ultimately
generate PDF).  It reads and sends mail and news.  It does file
browsing.  It integrates tightly with version control systems.  It keeps
the calendar and other stuff.

> But again, did I expect too much out of emacs?  So far I find it to be
> about as good as BBEdit . It's a text editor but no more.  I expected
> emacs to be the one program that ruled them all.

It is not that dissimilar.  Hobbits can resist pretty long.

-- 
David Kastrup