From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Daniel Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Failing to see the allure of Emacs Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:02:39 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1273056405 28198 80.91.229.12 (5 May 2010 10:46:45 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 10:46:45 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed May 05 12:46:43 2010 connect(): No such file or directory Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1O9c7f-0000Gh-Fc for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 05 May 2010 12:46:35 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:43431 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1O9c7e-0007Ju-US for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 05 May 2010 06:46:35 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!30g2000yqi.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 30 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 140.247.237.158 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1269198159 21156 127.0.0.1 (21 Mar 2010 19:02:39 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:02:39 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: 30g2000yqi.googlegroups.com; posting-host=140.247.237.158; posting-account=J_rboAoAAAD3aFlQS_0lyR1POAjQoPF4 User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:177518 X-Mailman-Approved-At: Tue, 04 May 2010 16:48:21 -0400 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:73364 Archived-At: 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. If I've still got to leave the emacs environment to do general computing tasks, what is the productivity gain here? There are plugins, I know, but I haven't explored those. I've always been someone who reads the shortcuts built into something like BBEdit or TextWrangler, Notepad ++, or Eclipse, so I am not sure how much more productive I'll be. Also, I'm a bit confused with regards to using dired to navigate files vs just the bash shell, which I'm more familiar with. 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. Thanks