Re: emacs vs vs.net

[kgold@watson.ibm.com (kgold)]

There are two questions - using emacs for email and comparing it to
Notepad.

For email, I will admit that, if all you want to do is read email,
there are probably better choices than emacs.  But, if you want to
write as well, most email clients have very primitive Notepad type
editors.

Now compared to Notepad, both have simple copy, cut and paste.  I
prefer emacs, where you can do the entire operation using the mouse,
to Notepad's "mark with the mouse, copy with the keyboard, move with
the mouse, paste with the keyboard."  If you like continuously
switching between the keyboard and mouse, you'll like Notepad.

Beyond cut and paste, Notepad flops.  In emacs you can move the cursor
by word, sentence, paragraph, etc.  You can transpose letters or
words, capitalize, uppercase or lowercase a word, define and run
macros, split the screen, run a spell checker, do language
translation, enter accented characters, and infinite undo.

emacs really shines when you go beyond email, as it understands
various programming languages, so it eases program entry and
compilation.  It hooks easily to debuggers and source control servers.

Finally, it runs on Windows, Mac, and Unix, so it's learn once - use
everywhere.

And it's free.

And you get free support.

"William Shieh" <gwshieh@hotmail.com> writes:
> 
> i'm very new to email and the system i'm using most of the time is win32.
> could someone give me some example why emacs is so powerful? from what i
> could see is that it takes more key to do a simple copy and paste than
> notepad. i know notepad is probably not a good example, however, can anyone
> give me a good reason why you use emacs instead of vs.net from ms?


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