How old are Emacs users?

How old are Emacs users?

[30ish emacs user]

I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
you? I'm 32.

I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.

The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
graphical editor land.

That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
interesting. :)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu>
> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:07:18 +0000 (UTC)
> 
> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.

??? What's not graphical about Emacs?  Are you familiar with Speedbar,
Customize, and gdb-ui, to name just a few very graphical features?
Modern Emacs has menus, scroll bars, tool-bar buttons, tooltips
(a.k.a. balloon help), and all the other attributes of a GUI program.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[The Chief Instigator]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

>I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>you? I'm 32.

>I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
>graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
>alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.

>The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
>first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
>graphical editor land.

>That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
>post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
>interesting. :)

I started using it at 34 (getting Internet access at rice.edu), and have been
using it ever since.  (I'll be 52 next month.)

-- 
   Patrick "The Chief Instigator" Humphrey (patrick@io.com)  Houston, Texas  
    chiefinstigator.us.tt/aeros.php  (TCI's 2006-07 Houston Aeros) AA#2273
                LAST GAME: San Antonio 4, Houston 2 (April 15)
               NEXT GAME: October 2007, date/place/opponent TBA

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[30ish emacs user]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:
> 
> ??? What's not graphical about Emacs?  Are you familiar with Speedbar,
> Customize, and gdb-ui, to name just a few very graphical features?
> Modern Emacs has menus, scroll bars, tool-bar buttons, tooltips
> (a.k.a. balloon help), and all the other attributes of a GUI program.
> 

I meant the API is mostly character based. I can insert images of
course, but I cannot draw random pixel lines across the buffer right?
There is no complete pixel-level control of buffer presentation. I
cannot toggle single pixels on the screen, if I'm not mistaken.

I haven't seen code collapsing displayed like this in emacs:

   http://www.dream-com.com/images/editor/codecollapse.bmp

It can probably be emulated with images of course to an extent, but
it's not the same as simply drawing a vertical pixel line.

That's what I mean by a "graphical" editor. 

Nevertheless, I use emacs. :)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tassilo Horn]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

Hi,

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

I'm 26, but I started using it about 5 years ago. Sometimes I used
Eclipse for some Java projects, and although it has some superior
features (e.g. the refactoring tools and support for all features
introduced after java 5) I always came back to emacs quickly.

The thing with those "modern" apps is that most of them have one or two
areas where they shine, but a lot more areas where they're far from
complete or even buggy.

Once I was at a workshop where one guy gave an introduction into
programming extensions for the eclipse framework and I thought that I
could write any extension to emacs in much shorter time as it takes to
only edit the bunch of configuration XML files an eclipse extension
needs.

So In my opinion eclipse (and Java) are like bureaucracy, whereas emacs
and elisp are like "just do it".

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
The  desire  to  be  rewarded  for one's  creativity  does  not  justify
depriving  the world  in  general of  all  or part  of that  creativity.
(Richard M. Stallman)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu>
() Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:07:18 +0000 (UTC)

   The statistics could be
   interesting. :)

in one dimension: smarter than emacs, not smarter than emacs.
in another: wiser than emacs, not wiser than emacs.

eventually, humans move: more live than emacs to less live than emacs.

but emacs moves, too!

heading face-first into the z,
squandering time to explore the axes,
lparen, frobbity-frob, rparen, see?
opinions based on just the facts, please?

thi

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tassilo Horn]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

Hi,

> I haven't seen code collapsing displayed like this in emacs:
>
>    http://www.dream-com.com/images/editor/codecollapse.bmp
>
> It can probably be emulated with images of course to an extent, but
> it's not the same as simply drawing a vertical pixel line.

Although I cannot see the picture (I'm currently logged in at home via
ssh. Another point for emacs!), I do know what you mean. Or take KDE's
diff tool kompare. Instead of inserting empty lines in file A's display
if parts of file B have to be inserted there, it renders nice Bézier
curves directly on the canvas to indicate where the parts of B have to
be inserted.

And as you said, folded/collapsed/outlined text would be much better
indicated with a vertical pixel line than with the three dots emacs
appends to the text before. That's simply not eye-catching enough.

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
If programmers deserve to  be rewarded for creating innovative programs,
by the same  token they deserve to be punished if  they restrict the use
of these programs. (Richard M. Stallman)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Stein Arild Strømme]

[kalap.kabat@freemail.hu]

| I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
| you? I'm 32.

Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.
-- 
Stein Arild Strømme            +47 55584825, +47 95801887
Universitetet i Bergen                  Fax: +47 55589672     
Matematisk institutt, UiB     http://math.uib.no/stromme/         
Johs Brunsg 12, N-5008 BERGEN         stromme@math.uib.no

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Rainer Stengele]

30ish emacs user wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
> 
> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
> 
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.
> 
> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> interesting. :)
> 
> 
> 
> 
long time vim user, still so over ssh, now started to dive into
EmacsW32 with growing excitement, learning lisp in parallel.
My colleague (18-generation "windows") is very hard to convince ...
42

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Johan Bockgård]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

> than with the three dots emacs appends to the text before. That's
> simply not eye-catching enough.

(defface selective-display
  '((((supports (:underline "red")))
     (:underline "red"))
    (t
     (:inverse-video t)))
  "")

(unless standard-display-table
  (setq standard-display-table (make-display-table)))

(set-display-table-slot
 standard-display-table
 'selective-display
 (vconcat (mapcar (lambda (c) (make-glyph-code c 'selective-display))
		  "...")))

-- 
Johan Bockgård

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Matthew Flaschen]

Tassilo Horn wrote:
> 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>> you? I'm 32.
> 
> I'm 26, but I started using it about 5 years ago.

I'm 19.

> Sometimes I used
> Eclipse for some Java projects, and although it has some superior
> features (e.g. the refactoring tools and support for all features
> introduced after java 5) I always came back to emacs quickly.

Same.  I actually tried Eclipse first, but now am using emacs.  Eclipse
has some extra features, but it's not worth the complexity for small
projects.

Matthew Flaschen

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tassilo Horn]

bojohan+news@dd.chalmers.se (Johan Bockgård) writes:

Hi Johan,

>> than with the three dots emacs appends to the text before. That's
>> simply not eye-catching enough.
>
> (defface selective-display
>   '((((supports (:underline "red")))
>      (:underline "red"))
>     (t
>      (:inverse-video t)))
>   "")
>
> (unless standard-display-table
>   (setq standard-display-table (make-display-table)))
>
> (set-display-table-slot
>  standard-display-table
>  'selective-display
>  (vconcat (mapcar (lambda (c) (make-glyph-code c 'selective-display))
> 		  "...")))

Hey, that's nice. I changed the face to

(defface selective-display
  '((default :inverse-video t)
    (((supports :underline "red")) :underline "red"))
  "Face used for fold markers like ...")

to make it really eye-catching. Anyway, a one pixel, dashed line would
look a bit better.

But maybe emacs could add some bitmap between the lines in the fringes
(info "(elisp)Fringes")? Most editors add a plus sign to the border, if
the code is collapsed.

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
If programmers deserve to  be rewarded for creating innovative programs,
by the same  token they deserve to be punished if  they restrict the use
of these programs. (Richard M. Stallman)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Nordlöw]

On 24 Apr, 12:05, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flasc...@gatech.edu>
wrote:
> Tassilo Horn wrote:
> > 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> writes:
>
> > Hi,
>
> >> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> >> you? I'm 32.
>
> > I'm 26, but I started using it about 5 years ago.
>
> I'm 19.
>
> > Sometimes I used
> > Eclipse for some Java projects, and although it has some superior
> > features (e.g. the refactoring tools and support for all features
> > introduced after java 5) I always came back to emacs quickly.
>
> Same.  I actually tried Eclipse first, but now am using emacs.  Eclipse
> has some extra features, but it's not worth the complexity for small
> projects.
>
> Matthew Flaschen

I'm 31, started about 10 years ago, at the University.

/Per Nordlöw

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Kai Grossjohann]

37, been using Emacs since 18.59, now using Eclipse for Java
development.  (With viPlugin!  I can't stand the default Eclipse
keybindings, nor their approximation of Emacs bindings.  Without
viPlugin, I'd go insane.  viPlugin is not free software, though.)

I resisted Eclipse for a long time, but now I find refactoring and
quickfixes invaluable tools.  Completion in Eclipse is much better
than everything I've been able to obtain with Emacs + JDEE + ECB + the
bovine tools.  And the project navigation is really good, too, though
the distance to Emacs is not that big.

I started jde-quickfix.el (or was it jde-qfix.el?), but it remained a
proof of concept, not having achieved real usefulness.  It was too
difficult to parse the Jave code to figure out how to edit it
programmatically.  Perhaps these days the bovinator provides more
parsing information so it would be possible to edit the code.  Or
perhaps it would have been easier to parse the code myself than I
thought.

Indentation in Eclipse really sucks, though.

Kai



30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
>
> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.
>
> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> interesting. :)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Bjørge Solli]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 182 bytes --]

On 4/24/07, 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> wrote:
>
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.


29. also uses vi[m].

-- 
bs

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[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 152 bytes --]

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Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu>
> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 06:41:52 +0000 (UTC)
> 
> I meant the API is mostly character based.

No, it isn't.

> I can insert images of
> course, but I cannot draw random pixel lines across the buffer right?

We are talking about an editor, not an image editor.  What other
programmer's editor gives you random pixels?

> There is no complete pixel-level control of buffer presentation.

What exactly do you mean by that?

> I cannot toggle single pixels on the screen, if I'm not mistaken.

What other programmer's editor gives you that, and to what end?

> I haven't seen code collapsing displayed like this in emacs:
> 
>    http://www.dream-com.com/images/editor/codecollapse.bmp

Try hideshow in Emacs.

> That's what I mean by a "graphical" editor. 

Perhaps you need to switch to Gimp, then.  Most of us here use Emacs
primarily as program development environment, where the pixel game is
something one needs only very rarely.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Sebastian Meisel]

Nordlöw schrieb:
> On 24 Apr, 12:05, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flasc...@gatech.edu>
> wrote:
>   
>> Tassilo Horn wrote:
>>     
>>> 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> writes:
>>>       
>>> Hi,
>>>       
>>>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>>>> you? I'm 32.
>>>>         
>>> I'm 26, but I started using it about 5 years ago.
>>>       
>> I'm 19.
>>     
> I'm 31, started about 10 years ago, at the University.
>
>   
I'm 29, started in 2001.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[William Case]

Hi;

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 05:07 +0000, 30ish emacs user wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
> 
> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
> 
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.
> 
> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> interesting. :)
> 
I am 63.  The kids have moved out, my wife has passed away.  I was no
longer getting enough confusion, frustration, anger and disappointment
in my life so 2 years I started using emacs.  It has filled the bill
superbly.

-- 
Regards Bill

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Denis Bueno]

On 4/24/07, William Case <billlinux@rogers.com> wrote:
> Hi;
>
> On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 05:07 +0000, 30ish emacs user wrote:
> > I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> > you? I'm 32.

23. First exposed to emacs as a freshman at 18.

-Denis

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[hemant]

On 4/24/07, William Case <billlinux@rogers.com> wrote:
> Hi;
>
> On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 05:07 +0000, 30ish emacs user wrote:
> > I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> > you? I'm 32.
> >
> > I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> > graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> > alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
> >
> > The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> > first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> > graphical editor land.
> >
> > That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> > post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> > interesting. :)
> >
> I am 63.  The kids have moved out, my wife has passed away.  I was no
> longer getting enough confusion, frustration, anger and disappointment
> in my life so 2 years I started using emacs.  It has filled the bill
> superbly.
>
> --
> Regards Bill

I am 23 and using Emacs since last 5 years. Yet learning.

-- 
gnufied
-----------
There was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs
were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.
http://people.inxsasia.com/hemant

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
() Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:17:43 +0300

   Try hideshow in Emacs.

someone already posted some code to make "..." stand out.
that approach can be combined w/ `hs-set-up-overlay'
and fringe bitmaps to get "marginal pixel satisfaction"
craved by the OP, probably.  i haven't tried it.

if someone tries it and hideshow fails it, please let me know.

thi

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[The Chief Instigator]

"Bjørge Solli" <flisespikker@gmail.com> writes:

>On 4/24/07, 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> wrote:

>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>> you? I'm 32.

>29. also uses vi[m].

You, too?  (For some reason, I use Emacs for newsreading. but I have a
tendency to use vi for editing my web pages.)

-- 
   Patrick "The Chief Instigator" Humphrey (patrick@io.com)  Houston, Texas  
    chiefinstigator.us.tt/aeros.php  (TCI's 2006-07 Houston Aeros) AA#2273
                LAST GAME: San Antonio 4, Houston 2 (April 15)
               NEXT GAME: October 2007, date/place/opponent TBA

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Clinton Curry]

On 4/24/07, 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

24, also a vim-head.


Clinton

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Dmitry Dzhus]

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you?

I am 18.

Using Emacs on GNU/Linux since January 2007, when I was 17 and moved
to Emacs from vim. I'm gradually mastering vast Emacs' field of
application fascinatedly. By now I'm using the following in Emacs:

- `org-mode` to take down notes and thoughts

- `gnus` to read newsgroups and my e-mail

- `bongo` to listen to music (though still sometimes fall to
  audacious)

- modes for C and Python programming; willing to get a good
  documentation browser for Python modules and get used to more handy
  tools for C and Python code (semantic, speedbar etc.)

- modes for XML, XHTML, JavaScript and CSS editing to maintain my tiny
  blog templates

- `dvc` as an interface to my GNU Arch managed code (though I consider
  to move to bazaar-ng)

- `tramp` to get transparent access to my hosting provider shell via
  ssh

- `jabber` to do some jabbering occasionly

My Emacs is from CVS on Gentoo GNU/Linux.

-- 
Happy Hacking.

Dmitry "Sphinx" Dzhus
http://sphinx.net.ru

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Luca Saiu]

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30ish emacs user wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

I'm 28. I started using it 11 years ago.

- --
Luca Saiu
Author of GNU epsilon: http://www.gnu.org/software/epsilon
http://www-lipn.lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~saiu
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Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Peter Tury]

Sebastian Meisel <sebastianmeisel@web.de> writes:

> Nordlöw schrieb:
>> On 24 Apr, 12:05, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flasc...@gatech.edu>
>> wrote:
>>   
>>> Tassilo Horn wrote:
>>>     
>>>> 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> writes:
>>>>       Hi,
>>>>       
>>>>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>>>>> you? I'm 32.
>>>>>         
>>>> I'm 26, but I started using it about 5 years ago.
>>>>       
>>> I'm 19.
>>>     
>> I'm 31, started about 10 years ago, at the University.
>>
>>   
> I'm 29, started in 2001.

36. Started with Emacs 3 years ago. I wanted vim (since I knew it
then), but I was told it didn't support what I needed -- and Emacs had
a major mode for it :-) On the other hand I saw several trials (like
e.g. http://www.mozart-oz.org/) are much easier to catch with Emacs.

\bye
P

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Giovanni Giorgi]

I am 33 from yesterday :)

I am confortable with emacs, because it has plenty of programming
tools/tricks/utilities like ediff/occur and so on.
But I use Eclipse for all-day-java coding, because of auto-
completition and fast switch to source/docs to reference library.
The main problem  is elisp because it is difficult to learn in my own
opinion, and so I prefere pymacs :)

Last but not least emacs is lighter then eclipse ;)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Peter Tury]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I haven't seen code collapsing displayed like this in emacs:
>
>    http://www.dream-com.com/images/editor/codecollapse.bmp

I have a feeling this lineish solution (used almost everywhere except
e.g. Emacs) sucks the same way as other picture-oriented stuff: what
if you could fold several nested blocks? Many lines should be placed
side by side...

Also I think it is much better if you can start folding _anywhere_
inside a foldable construct, i.e. you don't have to navigate (either
by mouse or by keys) to the "closing picture `-'". Ususally those
picture-oriented editors lacks this feature, I think.

\bye
P

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Franck Benoit]

Sebastian Meisel <sebastianmeisel@web.de> writes:

> Nordlöw schrieb:
>> On 24 Apr, 12:05, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flasc...@gatech.edu>
>> wrote:
>>   
>>> Tassilo Horn wrote:
>>>     
>>>> 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> writes:
>>>>       Hi,
>>>>       
>>>>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>>>>> you? I'm 32.
>>>>>         
>>>> I'm 26, but I started using it about 5 years ago.
>>>>       
>>> I'm 19.
>>>     
>> I'm 31, started about 10 years ago, at the University.
>>
>>   
> I'm 29, started in 2001.

31, started two years ago

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[David Hansen]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:03:21 -0400 Gian Uberto Lauri wrote:

> I'm 41, started about 17 years ago (22 including all Emacsen).
> My wife is 33 and her brother 26. We all use GNU Emacs :)

Hehe, just curious: anyone here with a misbehaving teenage
son/daughter using vi?

David

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ stromme@math.uib.no (Stein Arild Strømme):

| [kalap.kabat@freemail.hu]
|
| | I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
| | you? I'm 32.
|
| Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.

Dinosaur.  (Gjb lrnef byqre guna V!)

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Charles philip Chan]

On 24 Apr 2007, kalap.kabat@freemail.hu wrote:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

I am 43 and I started using Emacs 12 years ago. Now with the exception of
editing multi-media stuff, I never leave Emacs.

Charles 

-- 
panic("Lucy in the sky....");
        linux-2.2.16/arch/sparc64/kernel/starfire.c

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Shanks N]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
>

[...]

Me too.  Started around 1999 but started using it full time (as in
spending significant time learning it).  Started with version 20.7 on
windows.  Use Gnus too for mail and news.

Shanks

-- 

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Malte Spiess]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

> 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:
>
> Hi,
>
>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>> you? I'm 32.
>
> I'm 26, but I started using it about 5 years ago.

Hey, same here, I'm also 26 and started about 5 years ago! ;-)

Emacs rulz!

Malte

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Robert Marshall]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

> + stromme@math.uib.no (Stein Arild Strømme):
> 
>| [kalap.kabat@freemail.hu]
>|
>| | I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old
>| | are you? I'm 32.
>|
>| Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.
> 
> Dinosaur.  (Gjb lrnef byqre guna V!)
> 

And one more than me, I've been using emacs since 1991[1] (probably!)  
I thought I started with 18.56 but maybe it was 18.59

Robert

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://groups.google.co.uk/group/gnu.emacs.gnus/msg/2762967b9669cedd?dmode=source
-- 
La grenouille songe..dans son château d'eau
Links and things http://rmstar.blogspot.com/

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Denise H. G.]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
>
> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.
>
> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> interesting. :)
>

I'm 29, starting using Emacs 21 about four years ago.

-- 
The verboten sign can keep out sin, but it cannot force a man to love virtue.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Amy Templeton]

30ish emacs user wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

Looks like I'm a baby. I'm 20 and started learning Emacs
when I was 18, when I started learning/using GNU/Linux. 

Somebody a little ways back said something about the
interface not being "friendly" or something because it lacks
flashy buttons and popups and stuff, but I actually had to
turn all of that stuff off because that's part of why I
can't use most other computer applications (I tend to use
Emacs for nearly all my computer-related work). So there are
those of us who gravitate to Emacs partially *because* it
has the option to be made un-flashy and annoying (no offense
to whomever designed those features for Emacs--they work
very well for what they are). In my case, of course, this
was also partially because I like having all my work in one
place, and because I'm not very good at using the mouse and
prefer to type everything or have that option, and because I
like tinkering with things because I'm somewhat OCD, which
elisp certainly leaves open the option for...not to mention
Emacs's phenomenal, cosmic powers as compared to, say,
Notepad or MS-Anything.

So yeah, that's my two cents.

Amy

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Kai" == Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:

Kai> I resisted Eclipse for a long time, but now I find refactoring and
Kai> quickfixes invaluable tools.  Completion in Eclipse is much better
Kai> than everything I've been able to obtain with Emacs + JDEE + ECB + the
Kai> bovine tools.  And the project navigation is really good, too, though
Kai> the distance to Emacs is not that big.

Yeah, I moved much of my Java development to Eclipse as well.  The
refactoring, incremental compilation, etc, are nice enough that it
outweighs how sucky the Eclipse editor is.

There's no intrinsic reason that the Eclipse JDT stuff could not be
wedded to Emacs.  However nobody has done the work :(.  As a proof of
concept though, you could look at "eclim", which is more or less
Eclipse attached to vim.

I haven't tried CEDET yet.  Maybe it is great :).  But it is hard to
believe it is as nice as Eclipse, after all Eclipse does code
generation for you, not just indexing.

Tom

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "30ish" == 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

30ish> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
30ish> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
30ish> interesting. :)

You do know that Emacs is an acronym for "Editor for Middle-Aged
Computer Scientists", right?

:-)

Tom

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ Robert Marshall <spam@chezmarshall.freeserve.co.uk>:

| On Tue, 24 Apr 2007, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:
|
|> + stromme@math.uib.no (Stein Arild Strømme):
|> 
|>| Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.
|> 
|> Dinosaur.  (Gjb lrnef byqre guna V!)
|> 
|
| And one more than me, I've been using emacs since 1991[1]
| (probably!)  I thought I started with 18.56 but maybe it was 18.59

So I got inspired into rooting through some old mail, and found one
from February of 1989 when I was building and using emacs 18.52 on an
Apollo workstation.  I may have used emacs occassionally before then,
but I think that was the start of my serious emacs use.  (But I have
kept my .emacs in RCS, then CVS, only since 1999.  Astounding the
amount of fluff that's in there, useless now but I must have felt a
need for it once.)

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ Amy Templeton <amy.g.templeton@gmail.com>:

| Somebody a little ways back said something about the
| interface not being "friendly" or something because it lacks
| flashy buttons and popups and stuff, but I actually had to
| turn all of that stuff off

Yep, first thing I did when 21 was out was to add (tool-bar-mode 0)
to my .emacs file ...

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Piet van Oostrum]

>>>>> stromme@math.uib.no (Stein Arild Strømme) (SAS) wrote:

>SAS> [kalap.kabat@freemail.hu]
>SAS> | I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>SAS> | you? I'm 32.

>SAS> Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.

I am 61. Have been using Emacs for about 20 years. I can't remember the
exact number of years. I still remember that in the early days I got the
Emacs distributions with UUCP through a 1200 bps modem (or was it 300?)
across the ocean. Scheduled during nightly hours to make use of `cheap'
telephone rates. The transfer took about 5 hours. This must have cost the
university quite some money.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP 8DAE142BE17999C4]
Private email: piet@vanoostrum.org

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Leonid Grinberg]

> Looks like I'm a baby. I'm 20 and started learning Emacs
> when I was 18, when I started learning/using GNU/Linux.

No way. I'm 15, and have been using Emacs since 3 years ago (when I
was 12), before I even used GNU/Linux.

I use it for pretty much all editing, but I use Firefox for web
browsing and gnome-terminal for shell.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>
> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:50:12 +0200
> 
> | Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.
> 
> Dinosaur.

Rude!

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ "Leonid Grinberg" <lgrinberg@gmail.com>:

|> Looks like I'm a baby. I'm 20 and started learning Emacs
|> when I was 18, when I started learning/using GNU/Linux.

Hmm.  How did that message end up referencing mine, while quoting the
parent?  Oh well, never mind, if that makes me look like I'm 20 then
so be it.

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Dieter Wilhelm]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

44

> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.

Not quite I had to take a detour, started with the editor in Norton
Commander (around 1990) and then learned the whole graphical Windows
ballast.  Must have been around 1997 when I started using Emacs under
Windows because I had to edit Mathematica source files with deep
levels of curly braces.  Emacs was the best tool I somehow knew for
finding the wrong braces.

Bit by bit Emacs teached me also the value of Unix tools which I
better got to know with Cygwin and this lead me ultimately in 2000 to
abandon Windows completly at home for GNU/Linux.

I also had a spell with vim, which I admire very much and which is in
a sense even purer than Emacs but I found that Emacs is better (for my
needs) and will stay now with it to the end.

-- 
    Best wishes

    H. Dieter Wilhelm
    Darmstadt, Germany

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Gian Uberto Lauri]

>>>>> "LS" == Luca Saiu <positron@gnu.org> writes:

LS> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

LS> 30ish emacs user wrote:
>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old
>> are you? I'm 32.

LS> I'm 28. I started using it 11 years ago.

I'm 41, started about 17 years ago (22 including all Emacsen).
My wife is 33 and her brother 26. We all use GNU Emacs :)


-- 
 /\           ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
  //--\| | \|  |   Integralista GNUslamico
\/                 e coltivatore diretto di Software

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[David Strozzi]

For my part, I'm a few months shy of 30, been using emacs in some form
for ~8 years, but only in the last 6 months have I really gotten into
it.  I'm somewhat trying to become like this guy at MIT who, in a
discussion about operating systems, said "Linux is nice, but I prefer
emacs."

-Dave

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Joe Fineman]

Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:

> + stromme@math.uib.no (Stein Arild Strømme):
>
> | [kalap.kabat@freemail.hu]
> |
> | | I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How
> | | old are you? I'm 32.
> |
> | Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.
>
> Dinosaur.  (Gjb lrnef byqre guna V!)

This trilobite is 69 & has been using Emacs for 20 years.
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  When you are trying to make an impression, the chances are  :||
||:  that is the impression you will make.                       :||

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Bill Wohler]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

I'm 44 and have been using Emacs (and MH-E) since 1985. I'm glad to
see there is quite a bit of new blood here as well as old salts that
are saltier than I.

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:

|> From: Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>
|> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:50:12 +0200
|> 
|> | Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.
|> 
|> Dinosaur.
|
| Rude!

Indeed.  But Stein Arild is a personal friend, so he can take it.

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[cmr.Pent]

24, started 2 months ago.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Stein Arild Strømme]

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

| + Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
| 
| |> From: Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>
| |> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:50:12 +0200
| |> 
| |> | Age 56.  Emacs user since 18.59.
| |> 
| |> Dinosaur.
| |
| | Rude!
| 
| Indeed.  But Stein Arild is a personal friend, so he can take it.

Thanks for standing up for me, Eli!  :-)

SA
-- 
Stein Arild Strømme            +47 55584825, +47 95801887
Universitetet i Bergen                  Fax: +47 55589672     
Matematisk institutt, UiB     http://math.uib.no/stromme/         
Johs Brunsg 12, N-5008 BERGEN         stromme@math.uib.no

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Gian Uberto Lauri]

Quoting Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.uu.nl>:

> I am 61. Have been using Emacs for about 20 years. I can't remember the
> exact number of years. I still remember that in the early days I got the
> Emacs distributions with UUCP through a 1200 bps modem (or was it 300?)
> across the ocean. Scheduled during nightly hours to make use of `cheap'
> telephone rates. The transfer took about 5 hours. This must have cost the
> university quite some money.

*Bows respectfully*

I will print this (via ps-print-buffer) and post in my cubicle

--
  /\           ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
   //--\| | \|  |   Integralista GNUslamico
\/                 e coltivatore diretto di Software

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[dan]

On Apr 24, 12:07 am, 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
>
> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.
>
> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> interesting. :)

28, started using EMACS in 2001.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[David Kastrup]

Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:

> + Amy Templeton <amy.g.templeton@gmail.com>:
>
> | Somebody a little ways back said something about the
> | interface not being "friendly" or something because it lacks
> | flashy buttons and popups and stuff, but I actually had to
> | turn all of that stuff off
>
> Yep, first thing I did when 21 was out was to add (tool-bar-mode 0)
> to my .emacs file ...

Gross!  How can you stand the resize flicker?  Put

Emacs.toolBar: 0

into your X resources, as well as startup fonts and geometry.


-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[David Kastrup]

hemant <gethemant@gmail.com> writes:

> I am 23 and using Emacs since last 5 years. Yet learning.

We are more and more getting the situation that the version number of
Emacs is higher than that of its beginners.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>:

| Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:
|
|> Yep, first thing I did when 21 was out was to add (tool-bar-mode 0)
|> to my .emacs file ...
|
| Gross!  How can you stand the resize flicker?

By not starting a new emacs very often, I imagine.  But now you
mention it, I have noticed, and wondered about the cause.

| Put
|
| Emacs.toolBar: 0
|
| into your X resources, as well as startup fonts and geometry.

Hmm.  Okay, that sounds like good advice.

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Exal de Jesus Garcia Carrillo]

El Miércoles, 25 de Abril de 2007 13:42, David Kastrup escribió:

> We are more and more getting the situation that the version number of
> Emacs is higher than that of its beginners.

23 years old, 2 using Emacs, beginner :D

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Patrick Drechsler]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:
>> Yep, first thing I did when 21 was out was to add (tool-bar-mode 0)
>> to my .emacs file ...
>
> Gross!  How can you stand the resize flicker?  Put
>
> Emacs.toolBar: 0
>
> into your X resources, as well as startup fonts and geometry.

But what do you do when working on different OSs? As far as I know
there is no ~/.Xresources file in Windows? Until you mentioned the
flickering I didn't even notice it... ;-)

So customizing ~/.emacs.d/init.el with

  '(tool-bar-mode nil)

seems a fair option.

As far as I can see there is no way of putting startup fonts and
geometry in an init.el file that will work with all OSs and
resolutions by default. Please advice me if I missed something
obvious. Currently all my emacs config stuff is in ~/.emacs.d/ and
under version control. And working fine using multiple workstations on
Windows and GNU/Linux (even with windows snapshots of cvs-emacs-22 and
linux-cvs-23-xft).

Cheers

Patrick
-- 
OS's and GUI's come and go, only Emacs has lasting power.
(Per Abrahamsen)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tim X]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:
>
>> + Amy Templeton <amy.g.templeton@gmail.com>:
>>
>> | Somebody a little ways back said something about the
>> | interface not being "friendly" or something because it lacks
>> | flashy buttons and popups and stuff, but I actually had to
>> | turn all of that stuff off
>>
>> Yep, first thing I did when 21 was out was to add (tool-bar-mode 0)
>> to my .emacs file ...
>
> Gross!  How can you stand the resize flicker?  Put
>
> Emacs.toolBar: 0
>
> into your X resources, as well as startup fonts and geometry.
>

Have to agree with David here. Thats exactly what I did and why I did it. apart
from that, I think its easier, clearer and faster than writing bits of elisp to
set the default frame, the initial frame and then turn off toolbar etc.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Peter Tury]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> We are more and more getting the situation that the version number of
> Emacs is higher than that of its beginners.

The version number of its beginners? :-))))

---8<---

Well, I would say my version number is 1. Or 3. Or 0.4 ;-) Or 6,123,456.
Or ...

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Jiri Pejchal]

Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:

>>>>>> "30ish" == 30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:
>
> 30ish> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> 30ish> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> 30ish> interesting. :)
>
> You do know that Emacs is an acronym for "Editor for Middle-Aged
> Computer Scientists", right?

Actually it means GNU Emacs - Generally Not Used Except by Middle Aged 
Computer Scientists.

--
Jiri Pejchal

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tim X]

Klaus Straubinger <KSNetz@UseNet.ArcorNews.DE> writes:

> Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>
> [startup settings in X resources]
>> I think its easier, clearer and faster than writing bits of elisp to
>> set the default frame, the initial frame and then turn off toolbar
>> etc.
>
> I don't find it easier to maintain settings in two different places,
> with totally different syntaxes, where one of them is operating-system
> dependent. And why is that clearer?
>
> Emacs settings should be in the Emacs initialization file, in my
> opinion.
>

Fine and your welcome to disagree. I just fine five or so lines of the form 

Emacs.geometry: 80x55
Emacs.toolbar: 0
etc

simpler than having to have 

(setq initial-frame-alist '((top . 1) 
                            (left . 1) 
                            (width . 80) 
                            (height . 55)))
(setq default-frame-alist '((top . 1)
                            (left . 1)
                            (width . 80)
                            (height . 55)))

plus you still get the resize flicker etc, which you don't get if you put
things in xresources. Of course, everyones milage differs. I don't work on
multiple platforms, so having all my X stuff in xresources is both convenient
and consistent for me. If I also ran on Windows, maybe I'd do it differently
(though I expect you wold need different settings anyway). 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Pascal Bourguignon]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:

> Klaus Straubinger <KSNetz@UseNet.ArcorNews.DE> writes:
>
>> Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>>
>> [startup settings in X resources]
>>> I think its easier, clearer and faster than writing bits of elisp to
>>> set the default frame, the initial frame and then turn off toolbar
>>> etc.
>>
>> I don't find it easier to maintain settings in two different places,
>> with totally different syntaxes, where one of them is operating-system
>> dependent. And why is that clearer?
>>
>> Emacs settings should be in the Emacs initialization file, in my
>> opinion.
>>
>
> Fine and your welcome to disagree. I just fine five or so lines of the form 
>
> Emacs.geometry: 80x55
> Emacs.toolbar: 0
> etc
>
> simpler than having to have 
>
> (setq initial-frame-alist '((top . 1) 
>                             (left . 1) 
>                             (width . 80) 
>                             (height . 55)))
> (setq default-frame-alist '((top . 1)
>                             (left . 1)
>                             (width . 80)
>                             (height . 55)))
>
> plus you still get the resize flicker etc, which you don't get if you put
> things in xresources. Of course, everyones milage differs. I don't work on
> multiple platforms, so having all my X stuff in xresources is both convenient
> and consistent for me. If I also ran on Windows, maybe I'd do it differently
> (though I expect you wold need different settings anyway). 

You could also add a little elisp function to update ~/.Xresources with
the default-frame-alist, so the flicker disappears after the next
launch when you change your ~/.emacs.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

"Indentation! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!"

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Peter Lee]

>>>> Patrick Drechsler writes:

    > But what do you do when working on different OSs? As far as I know
    > there is no ~/.Xresources file in Windows? Until you mentioned the
    > flickering I didn't even notice it... ;-)
    > So customizing ~/.emacs.d/init.el with
    >   '(tool-bar-mode nil)
    > seems a fair option.

If you don't like any of the extra display stuff.. toolbars, scrollbars..

you could use "-Q -D -load ~/.emacs" to avoid the "flicker"

On linux I typically `alias e = "emacs -Q -D -load ~/.emacs"`
On windows I just make a shortcut for the same.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tyler Smith]

On 2007-04-27, Peter Lee <pete.a.lee@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you don't like any of the extra display stuff.. toolbars, scrollbars..
>
> you could use "-Q -D -load ~/.emacs" to avoid the "flicker"
>
> On linux I typically `alias e = "emacs -Q -D -load ~/.emacs"`
> On windows I just make a shortcut for the same.

Neither -Q or -D are recognised options for me, nor can I find
descriptions of them in the emacs printed manual or man
pages... lowercase q may be what you're thinking of, but that seems
unlikely with -load ~/.emacs, and lowercase d doesn't make sense in
this context.

This flicker everyone is talking about - is that the brief flash of
toolbar and repositioning of the emacs frame that occurs in the first
second or two of booting up? Seems like a lot of bother over something
so ephemeral. Not that I'd complain if I could eliminate it, but
hardly something to get excited about.

The discussion has been very helpful though, as I've now discovered
initial-frame-alist, which lead to special-display- et al. That's
going to be very handy when I sort it out to my needs!

Cheers,

Tyler

ps. regarding the topic of this thread: I'm 34, been using emacs for
twoish years, initially as the best alternative to the MSWindows GUI
for R on GNU/Linux, now for pretty much everything. I'm a botanist,
which confuses the compsci people I meet almost as much as my use of
emacs confuses my botanist colleagues.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Tyler Smith wrote:
> Neither -Q or -D are recognised options for me, nor can I find
> descriptions of them in the emacs printed manual or man
> pages... 

They are new in Emacs 22 (in beta yet, but hopefully very soon released).

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tyler Smith]

On 2007-04-27, Lennart Borgman (gmail) <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
> Tyler Smith wrote:
>> Neither -Q or -D are recognised options for me, nor can I find
>> descriptions of them in the emacs printed manual or man
>> pages... 
>
> They are new in Emacs 22 (in beta yet, but hopefully very soon released).
>

Ah, thanks. I look forward to 22, seems to have a lot of new stuff in
it. Not quite adventurous enough at the moment to install it myself --
I'll wait til it makes it's way into debian testing.

Cheers,

Tyler

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Hadron]

Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca> writes:

> On 2007-04-27, Lennart Borgman (gmail) <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Tyler Smith wrote:
>>> Neither -Q or -D are recognised options for me, nor can I find
>>> descriptions of them in the emacs printed manual or man
>>> pages... 
>>
>> They are new in Emacs 22 (in beta yet, but hopefully very soon released).
>>
>
> Ah, thanks. I look forward to 22, seems to have a lot of new stuff in
> it. Not quite adventurous enough at the moment to install it myself --
> I'll wait til it makes it's way into debian testing.

Install the "emacs-snapshot" - works well.

>
> Cheers,
>
> Tyler
>

-- 

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tim X]

Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca> writes:

> On 2007-04-27, Peter Lee <pete.a.lee@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If you don't like any of the extra display stuff.. toolbars, scrollbars..
>>
>> you could use "-Q -D -load ~/.emacs" to avoid the "flicker"
>>
>> On linux I typically `alias e = "emacs -Q -D -load ~/.emacs"`
>> On windows I just make a shortcut for the same.
>
> Neither -Q or -D are recognised options for me, nor can I find
> descriptions of them in the emacs printed manual or man
> pages... lowercase q may be what you're thinking of, but that seems
> unlikely with -load ~/.emacs, and lowercase d doesn't make sense in
> this context.
>

I think these switches are new ones added in CVS emacs 22 and not available with
the stable version, emacs 21.

> This flicker everyone is talking about - is that the brief flash of
> toolbar and repositioning of the emacs frame that occurs in the first
> second or two of booting up? Seems like a lot of bother over something
> so ephemeral. Not that I'd complain if I could eliminate it, but
> hardly something to get excited about.
>

True. However, depending on how far your desired config is different to the
emacs defaults, the flicker can be quite substantial - actually, more than just
a flicker as the frame changes size etc. I found it particularly annoying when
I wanted a different text font and size (larger for the window text, smaller
for menu text, no toolbar, larger geometry etc. 

> The discussion has been very helpful though, as I've now discovered
> initial-frame-alist, which lead to special-display- et al. That's
> going to be very handy when I sort it out to my needs!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tyler
>
> ps. regarding the topic of this thread: I'm 34, been using emacs for
> twoish years, initially as the best alternative to the MSWindows GUI
> for R on GNU/Linux, now for pretty much everything. I'm a botanist,
> which confuses the compsci people I meet almost as much as my use of
> emacs confuses my botanist colleagues.

Me - 50. vi user from early 80's until 95. Switched to emacs and use it for
almost everything. Did try using emacs in late 80's but just couldn't push
myself to use it long enough to get as productive as I was with vi. Originally
switched to emacs after some bad luck that resulted in losing all but 5% of my
vision, so I am a heavy emacspeak user. Vision now down to less than 1%, so
startup flicker etc, no longer really and issue for me!

Tim
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tim X]

Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca> writes:

> On 2007-04-27, Lennart Borgman (gmail) <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Tyler Smith wrote:
>>> Neither -Q or -D are recognised options for me, nor can I find
>>> descriptions of them in the emacs printed manual or man
>>> pages... 
>>
>> They are new in Emacs 22 (in beta yet, but hopefully very soon released).
>>
>
> Ah, thanks. I look forward to 22, seems to have a lot of new stuff in
> it. Not quite adventurous enough at the moment to install it myself --
> I'll wait til it makes it's way into debian testing.
>

Note that its quite easy with Debian to run the testing version and have just a
couple of packages from unstable. This is what I do. Only emacs-snapshot (aka
emacs 22) is running from unstable, everything else is from testing. the
apt-get (and aptitude, dselect, etc) are able to handle this automatically. So,
when doing an update, it updates everything from testing except emacs-snapshot,
which it updates from unstable. 

Just mentioning it as its a handy feature when you want to run with the latest
'unstable' package, but don't want to run a system that is based on the
unstable branch for everything. You do need to make some minor changes in the
apt config, but these are very basic and I can supply them if you like.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Sebastian P. Luque]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:09:16 +1000,
Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:

[...]

> Note that its quite easy with Debian to run the testing version and have
> just a couple of packages from unstable. This is what I do. Only
> emacs-snapshot (aka emacs 22) is running from unstable, everything else
> is from testing. the apt-get (and aptitude, dselect, etc) are able to
> handle this automatically. So, when doing an update, it updates
> everything from testing except emacs-snapshot, which it updates from
> unstable.

emacs-snapshot has been orphaned for more than a month now, so is no
longer in sync with CVS.  Fortunately, the ex-maintainer is still kindly
offering the packages here:

http://emacs.orebokech.com/

Thanks to Romain for continuing to help the Debian user community.

-- 
Seb

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tim X]

"Sebastian P. Luque" <spluque@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:09:16 +1000,
> Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> Note that its quite easy with Debian to run the testing version and have
>> just a couple of packages from unstable. This is what I do. Only
>> emacs-snapshot (aka emacs 22) is running from unstable, everything else
>> is from testing. the apt-get (and aptitude, dselect, etc) are able to
>> handle this automatically. So, when doing an update, it updates
>> everything from testing except emacs-snapshot, which it updates from
>> unstable.
>
> emacs-snapshot has been orphaned for more than a month now, so is no
> longer in sync with CVS.  Fortunately, the ex-maintainer is still kindly
> offering the packages here:
>
> http://emacs.orebokech.com/
>
> Thanks to Romain for continuing to help the Debian user community.
>

thanks Seb. I was wondering why there hasn't been an update for over a month! 

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Edward Dodge]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old
> are you? I'm 32.

I'm 38 and I started using Emacs 9 years ago.

> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind
> of graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find
> Emacs alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.

Outside of a TI-99/4a, the only computers I've had have been
Macintoshes.  And although my degree is in computer engineering, I
didn't get interested in UNIX or Emacs until I attended a class on
them at work at the end of '98.

> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or
> emacs first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not
> migrating to graphical editor land.

At the age of 29, I was pleasantly surprised by Emacs.  I couldn't
believe such an elegant tool was possible.  I now realize there are
better, more specialized tools for each of the different programming
languages.  But none are better than Emacs for general programming and
futzing around in the textual world.

-- 
Edward Dodge

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Hadron]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:

> "Sebastian P. Luque" <spluque@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:09:16 +1000,
>> Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> Note that its quite easy with Debian to run the testing version and have
>>> just a couple of packages from unstable. This is what I do. Only
>>> emacs-snapshot (aka emacs 22) is running from unstable, everything else
>>> is from testing. the apt-get (and aptitude, dselect, etc) are able to
>>> handle this automatically. So, when doing an update, it updates
>>> everything from testing except emacs-snapshot, which it updates from
>>> unstable.
>>
>> emacs-snapshot has been orphaned for more than a month now, so is no
>> longer in sync with CVS.  Fortunately, the ex-maintainer is still kindly
>> offering the packages here:
>>
>> http://emacs.orebokech.com/
>>
>> Thanks to Romain for continuing to help the Debian user community.
>>
>
> thanks Seb. I was wondering why there hasn't been an update for over a month! 
>
> Tim

Yes, very useful! Thanks.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Sebastian P. Luque]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:24:37 +0200,
Hadron <hadronquark@gmail.com> wrote:

> Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:
>> "Sebastian P. Luque" <spluque@gmail.com> writes:

>>> On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:09:16 +1000,
>>> Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:

>> [...]

>>>> Note that its quite easy with Debian to run the testing version and
>>>> have just a couple of packages from unstable. This is what I do. Only
>>>> emacs-snapshot (aka emacs 22) is running from unstable, everything
>>>> else is from testing. the apt-get (and aptitude, dselect, etc) are
>>>> able to handle this automatically. So, when doing an update, it
>>>> updates everything from testing except emacs-snapshot, which it
>>>> updates from unstable.

>>> emacs-snapshot has been orphaned for more than a month now, so is no
>>> longer in sync with CVS.  Fortunately, the ex-maintainer is still
>>> kindly offering the packages here:

>>> http://emacs.orebokech.com/

>>> Thanks to Romain for continuing to help the Debian user community.


>> thanks Seb. I was wondering why there hasn't been an update for over a
>> month!

>> Tim

> Yes, very useful! Thanks.


If you're wondering why emacs-snapshot and others (or their docs) are no
longer in Debian main, this should help:


http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001



-- 
Seb

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Patrick Drechsler]

Peter Lee <pete.a.lee@gmail.com> writes:

>>>>> Patrick Drechsler writes:
>
>     > But what do you do when working on different OSs? As far as I know
>     > there is no ~/.Xresources file in Windows? Until you mentioned the
>     > flickering I didn't even notice it... ;-)
>     > So customizing ~/.emacs.d/init.el with
>     >   '(tool-bar-mode nil)
>     > seems a fair option.
>
> If you don't like any of the extra display stuff.. toolbars, scrollbars..
>
> you could use "-Q -D -load ~/.emacs" to avoid the "flicker"

Thanks for the pointer to these new startup options.

Cheers

Patrick
-- 
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with
themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
		-- Susan Ertz

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Bill White]

On Apr 24, 12:07 am, 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

I'm 40.

> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.

I started on Macintoshes in a typesetting company in 1991 at age 25.
The first decent text editor I used on the Mac was Qued/M on the
recommendation of TeX guru Art Ogawa, who spent a few weeks at our
company gettting us set up with TeX; I later moved on to Pete
Keleher's TCL-based Alpha.  Meanwhile I had fallen in love with emacs
thanks to Ed Reingold's calendar package, but the only version I had
access to was Marc Parmet's old Mac port of 18.59, which (IIRC) didn't
have a lisp interpreter.  Or I didn't have a chance to get into lisp.
It's hard to remember.

When I started working at my present job in 1996 (age 30) I was on an
old NeXT slab that had emacs - which I had long loved with an
unrequited love - and I decided to learn by total immersion: I would
do *everything* in emacs!  The manual became my bathroom and mealtime
companion, and now 11 years later I still do most everything in or
through emacs (except this dang gmail stuff).

Hmm... this is more of a conversion story - it might be more
appropriate in alt.religion.emacs :-)

Looking back on all this, it's good to note how the names have stayed
with me - I feel a deep gratitude to Art, Pete, Ed and Marc for
writing their software and answering questions.

bw
--
Bill White . minutiae@gmail.com . http://minutiae.stblogs.org

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Amy Templeton]

Bill White wrote:
> 11 years later I still do most everything in or through
> emacs (except this dang gmail stuff).

You can actually make gmail (somewhat) work with an Emacs
newsreader (in my case, it's accomplished by downloading
mail via POP3 with fetchmail and setting up SMTP to go
through gmail's server). There are other ways if you look
'round, though, I think...

Amy

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[CHENG Gao]

*On 28 Apr 2007 16:22:22 -0700
* Bill White <minutiae@gmail.com> climbed out of the dark hell and cried out:

>  (except this dang gmail stuff).
You need not do this dang gmail stuff in fact. You can use Gnus to read
this group via gmane.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Hadron]

Bill White <minutiae@gmail.com> writes:

> do *everything* in emacs!  The manual became my bathroom and mealtime
> companion, and now 11 years later I still do most everything in or
> through emacs (except this dang gmail stuff).

use gnus, fetchmail and maildir storage, smptmail to use gmail servers to
send.

Google has the answers.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Martin Fischer]

  >>>>> 30ish emacs user writes:
  > Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:07:18 +0000 (UTC)
  > 
  > I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
  > you? I'm 32.
  > 
  > I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
  > graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
  > alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
  > 
  > The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
  > first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
  > graphical editor land.
  > 
  > That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
  > post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
  > interesting. :)

Hi,

I'm nearly 57, using emacs since 16 years. After leaving VAX/VMS/LSE I
encounterd emacs, when I started working in a large, nearly collapsing
software project. It didn't fail in the end, which had a lot to do
with the use of free software like emacs, gcc, gdb, cygwin.

Since then I've been using some other environments including Borland
and Microsoft IDEs as well as Eclipse on Unix Windows and GNU/Linux
systems but nothing stopped me using the most flexible editor emacs.

Cheers

Martin
-- 
parozusa at web dot de

gmail and gnus

[Bill White]

On Sat Apr 28 2007 at 18:22, Bill White <minutiae@gmail.com> wrote:

> and now 11 years later I still do most everything in or through
> emacs (except this dang gmail stuff).

Here we go - gnus ahoy.  I use gmail:

- for their relatively infinite storage space (100 accounts * 2.7GB
  each),

- so I can easily read & show our kids all the graphics-heavy forwards
  my Mom sends :-) (I don't want to futz with w3, w3m, etc.)

- for access anywhere.

Unfortunately, gmail doesn't do IMAP:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10339 but there
are some workarounds I'll look into (google "gmail imap" without the
quotes).

Cheers, and thanks to all for the kick in the pants to get back to
gnus -

bw
-- 
Bill White . http://members.wolfram.com/billw
"No ma'am, we're musicians."

gmail and gnus

[Bill White]

On Sat Apr 28 2007 at 18:22, Bill White <minutiae@gmail.com> wrote:

> and now 11 years later I still do most everything in or through
> emacs (except this dang gmail stuff).

Here we go - gnus ahoy.  I use gmail:

- for their relatively infinite storage space (100 accounts * 2.7GB
  each),

- so I can easily read & show our kids all the graphics-heavy forwards
  my Mom sends :-) (I don't want to futz with w3, w3m, etc.)

- for access anywhere.

Unfortunately, gmail doesn't do IMAP:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10339 but there
are some workarounds I'll look into (google "gmail imap" without the
quotes).

Cheers, and thanks to all for the kick in the pants to get back to
gnus -

bw
-- 
Bill White . http://members.wolfram.com/billw
"No ma'am, we're musicians."

Re: gmail and gnus

[Hadron]

Bill White <billw@mchsi.com> writes:

> On Sat Apr 28 2007 at 18:22, Bill White <minutiae@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> and now 11 years later I still do most everything in or through
>> emacs (except this dang gmail stuff).
>
> Here we go - gnus ahoy.  I use gmail:
>
> - for their relatively infinite storage space (100 accounts * 2.7GB
>   each),
>
> - so I can easily read & show our kids all the graphics-heavy forwards
>   my Mom sends :-) (I don't want to futz with w3, w3m, etc.)

I use w3m and external browser for built in URLs.

>
> - for access anywhere.
>
> Unfortunately, gmail doesn't do IMAP:
> https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10339 but there
> are some workarounds I'll look into (google "gmail imap" without the
> quotes).
>
> Cheers, and thanks to all for the kick in the pants to get back to
> gnus -

Why use IMAP? You can access using pop3. Works for me. You are probably
better off in gnu.emacs.gnus

>
> bw

Crosspost & Followup-To: gnu.emacs.gnus
-- 

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Rjjd]

Joe Fineman wrote:
...
> 
> This trilobite is 69 & has been using Emacs for 20 years.


Well, I thought I was the Oldest Member, but Joe has 5 years on me.

I started using emacs when it was TECO.  Then I used Barry Scott's emacs 
  at DEC in the 80's (http://www.barrys-emacs.org/).  I'm retired now 
(or maybe unemployed), but when I was working, emacs was a necessity. 
At DEC, there were the expected attacks on emacs and TECO CPU 
consumption by people who thought attendance was a more important job 
requirement than delivery.  I started using GNU emacs in 1996, on Sun.

Incidentally, it's interesting that the age distribution of emacs users 
runs from 15 to 69, more than a half-century!

Wouldn't it be fun to see the geographical distribution?  I'm in New 
Hampshire, in the Northeast USA.  Where is everybody else?  I think 
emacs originated in Cambridge, MA.  Who's farthest away?

Regards,
Bob DiGrazia

Re: gmail and gnus

[William Xu]

Hadron <hadronquark@gmail.com> writes:

>> Unfortunately, gmail doesn't do IMAP:
>> https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10339 but there
>> are some workarounds I'll look into (google "gmail imap" without the
>> quotes).
>>
>> Cheers, and thanks to all for the kick in the pants to get back to
>> gnus -
>
> Why use IMAP? You can access using pop3. Works for me. You are probably
> better off in gnu.emacs.gnus

gmail pop3 is somehow doing some evil. It will randomly resist
downloading some mails. This has pissed me off many times !  I first
thought this might be fetchmail's problem, so i try switching to
`getmail'. Then, from getmail i found there's a FAQ entry just talking
about this issue:

,----[ getmail doesn't download all my mail from Gmail … ]
| There's a couple of different problems here. One is that Google's Gmail
| service violates the POP3 protocol by removing messages from the POP3
| view of the mailbox without the user issuing a DELE command. They do
| this as soon as an RETR command is given, so if getmail tries to
| download a message and it fails for any reason (delivery fails due to a
| full disk, or the Gmail server fails to respond, or the network
| connection dies before the transfer is complete, or the Gmail server
| fails to respond to the QUIT command, or …), the next time getmail
| connects to that Gmail account, Gmail will have "helpfully" deleted the
| message from the POP3 mailbox, even though getmail never issued a DELE
| command. So Gmail silently destroys mail, from a POP3
| perspective. There's nothing getmail can do about this.
| 
| Note this feature of Gmail is not well-publicized. The only
| mention I can find of it is here:
| 
| http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13291&topic=1555
| 
| The other issue here is that Google doesn't include mail from your trash
| or spam folders in the POP3 view, so getmail can't see those messages
| either. That's generally less of an issue, provided their spam filters
| never give false positive results (ha!).
`----

-- 
William

题目:《金错刀行》
作者:陆游（１１２５－１２１０）
黄金错刀白玉装，夜穿窗扉出光芒。
丈夫五十功未立，提刀独立顾八荒。
京华结交尽奇士，意气相期共生死。
千年史册耻无名，一片丹心报天子。
尔来从军天汉滨，南山晓雪玉嶙峋。
呜呼！楚虽三户能亡秦，岂有堂堂中国空无人！

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Livin Stephen Sharma]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 415 bytes --]


On 30-Apr-07, at 09:15 , help-gnu-emacs-request@gnu.org wrote:

> Wouldn't it be fun to see the geographical distribution?  I'm in  
> New Hampshire, in the Northeast USA.  Where is everybody else?  I  
> think emacs originated in Cambridge, MA.  Who's farthest away?


I'm 27, about 6 months using emacs on Mac OS X (and Aquamacs Emacs  
now since Jan'07).
   New Delhi and Bangalore ( India ).

-livin.stephen



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http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnu-emacs

Re: gmail and gnus

[Leo]

----- William Xu (2007-04-30) wrote:-----

> gmail pop3 is somehow doing some evil. It will randomly resist
> downloading some mails. This has pissed me off many times !  I first
> thought this might be fetchmail's problem, so i try switching to
> `getmail'. Then, from getmail i found there's a FAQ entry just talking
> about this issue:

I often see the following error when use NoGnus to fetch gmails. Is that
the same problem?

,----
| Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "POP SSL connexion failed")
|   signal(error ("POP SSL connexion failed"))
|   error("POP SSL connexion failed")
|   pop3-open-server("pop.gmail.com" 995)
|   pop3-movemail("~/.emacs-mail-crash-box")
|   mail-source-fetch-pop((pop :server "pop.gmail.com" :port 995 :user "sdl.web@gmail.com" :password "******" :stream ssl) #[(file orig-file) "Â\bÃÄ\b	š?….

-- 
Leo <sdl.web AT gmail.com>                         (GPG Key: 9283AA3F)

Re: gmail and gnus

[William Xu]

Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com> writes:

> I often see the following error when use NoGnus to fetch gmails. Is that
> the same problem?
>
> ,----
> | Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "POP SSL connexion failed")
> |   signal(error ("POP SSL connexion failed"))
> |   error("POP SSL connexion failed")
> |   pop3-open-server("pop.gmail.com" 995)
> |   pop3-movemail("~/.emacs-mail-crash-box")
> |   mail-source-fetch-pop((pop :server "pop.gmail.com" :port 995 :user "sdl.web@gmail.com" :password "******" :stream ssl) #[(file orig-file) "Â\bÃÄ\b	š?….

Seems not, I'm not sure. It's been long since last time i let Gnus fetch
gmails directly. (as i can't bear Gnus' fetching action blocking Emacs
all the time..)

-- 
William

You'd like to do it instantaneously, but that's too slow.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Tassilo Horn]

Rjjd <rjjd@tds.net> writes:

Hi,

> Wouldn't it be fun to see the geographical distribution?

Have a look at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsChannel.
There's a map of people who hang around in the #emacs irc channel.

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Robert Thorpe]

On Apr 24, 6:07 am, 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> wrote:
> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> interesting. :)

I'm 28, I've used Emacs for ~8 years.  The age distribution seems to
be interestingly even, many people from almost every decade of adult
life.

I would have thought that there would be two sets of people: Young
people who discovered Emacs via the web and Linux/GNU recently and a
older generation that discovered it installed on *nix machines at
their work or university.  But it seems not, if the thread is
representative then a steady stream of people have been introduced to
it for a long time.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Mathias Dahl]

30ish emacs user <kalap.kabat@freemail.hu> writes:

> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

I'm 34. Started using Emacs sometime between 1997 and 1999. Still
learning about features that has been in here since many years...

/Mathias

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Seweryn Kokot]

Livin Stephen Sharma <livin.stephen@gmail.com> writes:

> On 30-Apr-07, at 09:15 , help-gnu-emacs-request@gnu.org wrote:
>
>     Wouldn't it be fun to see the geographical distribution?  I'm in New Hampshire, in the Northeast USA.  Where is
>     everybody else?  I think emacs originated in Cambridge, MA.  Who's farthest away?
>
I'm 29. I have been using emacs for 2 years and live in Poland.
regards,
Seweryn Kokot

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Xavier Maillard]

   *On 28 Apr 2007 16:22:22 -0700
   * Bill White <minutiae@gmail.com> climbed out of the dark hell and cried out:

   >  (except this dang gmail stuff).
   You need not do this dang gmail stuff in fact. You can use Gnus to read
   this group via gmane.

And if you want to use other Google's services, you would be
interested in reading this:
http://emacspeak.blogspot.com/2007/03/emacs-client-for-google-services.html#cooliris .

Xavier

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Xavier Maillard]

   I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
   you? I'm 32.

I am 26 and use GNU Emacs since 1994 or maybe was it 1995. First
it was just as a "complementary" tool but it has became my
primary tool till 1998.

Xavier

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Robert Thorpe <rthorpe@realworldtech.com>
() 30 Apr 2007 03:00:31 -0700

   steady stream of people have been introduced to
   it for a long time.

slightly 'neath the swelling waves,
a few hooks beyond the frothy shore,
where modest programs do their saves,
churning text and likewise evermore...

the lively emacs accrues users and uses
wrecking mis-{s}expectations to utter grief,
gives b[ei]rth to who must refuse refuses
a buoyed-by-conversant {ba,me}rrier reef.

is there a cudgel made strong enough
to smash the cruft, raise waves of concern?
will ephemeral bow to sterner stuff
and stop the tidal tricks and turns?

monkey longs for sleep, unlike the fish,
whose delight and decay are emacs' wish.

thi

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Anders Wirzenius]

Martin Fischer <nospam@nospam.net> writes:

>   >>>>> 30ish emacs user writes:
>   > Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:07:18 +0000 (UTC)
>   > 
>   > I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>   > you? I'm 32.
>   > 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm nearly 57, using emacs since 16 years. After leaving VAX/VMS/LSE I
> encounterd emacs, when I started working in a large, nearly collapsing
> software project. It didn't fail in the end, which had a lot to do
> with the use of free software like emacs, gcc, gdb, cygwin.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Martin
> -- 

56.
Emacs user since 10 years. With MS Windows at work and Linuxes at
home Emacs is friendly and familiar "day and night".
I used VAX/VMS/EDT extensively in 1980's and experience similar
possibilities to build up your own context now with Emacs.

Emacs has an excellent Ada mode.

-- 
Anders Wirzenius

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Hadron]

Anders Wirzenius <anders@no.email.thanks.invalid> writes:

> Martin Fischer <nospam@nospam.net> writes:
>
>>   >>>>> 30ish emacs user writes:
>>   > Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:07:18 +0000 (UTC)
>>   > 
>>   > I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>>   > you? I'm 32.
>>   > 
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'm nearly 57, using emacs since 16 years. After leaving VAX/VMS/LSE I
>> encounterd emacs, when I started working in a large, nearly collapsing
>> software project. It didn't fail in the end, which had a lot to do
>> with the use of free software like emacs, gcc, gdb, cygwin.
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
>> Martin
>> -- 
>
> 56.
> Emacs user since 10 years. With MS Windows at work and Linuxes at
> home Emacs is friendly and familiar "day and night".
> I used VAX/VMS/EDT extensively in 1980's and experience similar
> possibilities to build up your own context now with Emacs.
>
> Emacs has an excellent Ada mode.

I used emacs back in 1989-91 to program ADA on some rather large
iron. Dropped it when moving to the PC world in 91. Just getting
familiar again. It's a way of life.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Martin Fischer]

  >>>>> 30ish emacs user writes:
  > Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:07:18 +0000 (UTC)
  > 
  > I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
  > you? I'm 32.
  > 
  > I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
  > graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
  > alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
  > 
  > The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
  > first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
  > graphical editor land.
  > 
  > That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
  > post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
  > interesting. :)

How old is RMS ?

-- 
parozusa at web dot de

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Xavier Maillard]

Hi,

   How old is RMS ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

But your asumption that GNU Emacs is as old as RMS is, is wrong
:)

Xavier

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

Robert Thorpe <rthorpe@realworldtech.com> writes:
> I'm 28, I've used Emacs for ~8 years.  The age distribution seems to
> be interestingly even, many people from almost every decade of adult
> life.

I'm 31, and I have been using Emacs on and off for about 12 years.

At first, I was using /usr/bin/vi of SunOS, but after I managed to
install Linux on my i486 PC at home, Emacs was and still is my favorite.

> I would have thought that there would be two sets of people: Young
> people who discovered Emacs via the web and Linux/GNU recently and a
> older generation that discovered it installed on *nix machines at
> their work or university.  But it seems not, if the thread is
> representative then a steady stream of people have been introduced to
> it for a long time.

Heh!

At least part of this steady stream of new Emacs fans is bound to be a
result of the extensive evangelising some of us keep going.

Many of my friends and colleagues know me as "the guy who can turn any
flamewar, err, I mean `conversation', to a discussion of the cool
features of some Emacs part", and it may please you to know that at
least _some_ of this effort to educate people about Emacs appears to
work :-)

- Giorgos

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Joe Fineman]

Rjjd <rjjd@tds.net> writes:

> Joe Fineman wrote:
> ...
>> This trilobite is 69 & has been using Emacs for 20 years.
>
>
> Well, I thought I was the Oldest Member, but Joe has 5 years on me.
>
> I started using emacs when it was TECO.

Ah, well, if we're doing prehistory, then I was using TV -- a
screen-oriented version of TECO -- in the mid '70s.  I cannot see any
resemblance between it & Emacs, however.  My understanding of the
relation between TECO & Emacs is that Stallman wrote the first Emacs
*in* TECO, there being no Elisp.
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  Christians & Marxists think suffering must mean something.  :||

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net>:

| Rjjd <rjjd@tds.net> writes:
|
|> Joe Fineman wrote:
|> ...
|>> This trilobite is 69 & has been using Emacs for 20 years.
|>
|>
|> Well, I thought I was the Oldest Member, but Joe has 5 years on me.
|>
|> I started using emacs when it was TECO.
|
| Ah, well, if we're doing prehistory, then I was using TV -- a
| screen-oriented version of TECO -- in the mid '70s.

Oh, come on.  Surely, I cannot be the only one here who's been using
punch cards?  Rhetorical question really; I know of one other at
least, that I gratuitously insulted a while back in the thread.  That
was in my student days.  We got really good with those card punches.
There was a minor competition going on, trying to squeeze the most
labour saving tricks into those control cards.

Someone is going to bring up clay tables next.

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 5/1/07, Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> wrote:

> Oh, come on.  Surely, I cannot be the only one here who's been using
> punch cards?  Rhetorical question really; I know of one other at
> least, that I gratuitously insulted a while back in the thread.

I used punch cards around 1982; it was old technology even then, as it
was the PDP-11 we first-year studends were also allowed to use. From
second year on we had access to several VAXen (with VMS, a great OS if
I ever saw one).

             Juanma

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Petter Gustad]

Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:

> Oh, come on.  Surely, I cannot be the only one here who's been using
> punch cards?  Rhetorical question really; I know of one other at

I used punched cards in 1981/1982. One of my first programs on the
GOULD SEL machine I used for seismic signal processing was to replace
the deck of seven cards to start the batch job and never have to use
punched cards again. 

Petter
-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Petter Gustad         8'h2B | ~8'h2B        http://www.gustad.com/petter

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Robert Marshall]

On Tue, 01 May 2007, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

> + Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net>:
> 
>| Ah, well, if we're doing prehistory, then I was using TV -- a
>| screen-oriented version of TECO -- in the mid '70s.
> 
> Oh, come on.  Surely, I cannot be the only one here who's been using
> punch cards?  Rhetorical question really; I know of one other at
> least, that I gratuitously insulted a while back in the thread.
> That was in my student days.  We got really good with those card
> punches.  There was a minor competition going on, trying to squeeze
> the most labour saving tricks into those control cards.

Me2 - I used to be able to use a hand card punch - not those fancy
electronic punches, and the terminals I started out on had paper tape
attachments but I never had the enjoyment of a paper tape splicing
session.


> 
> Someone is going to bring up clay tables next.
> 

probably

Robert
-- 
La grenouille songe..dans son château d'eau
Links and things http://rmstar.blogspot.com/

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Stein Arild Strømme]

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

| + Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net>:
| 
| | Ah, well, if we're doing prehistory, then I was using TV -- a
| | screen-oriented version of TECO -- in the mid '70s.
| 
| Oh, come on.  Surely, I cannot be the only one here who's been using
| punch cards?  Rhetorical question really; I know of one other at
| least, that I gratuitously insulted a while back in the thread. 

Hello hello!

I don't think even Harald used any version of emacs on those punch
cards, although I seem to recall that he did some binary code
programming, bypassing the assembler..  Special tricks to enter
non-ascii codes on those punching machines.  Were there Meta and
Control keys there, or how did we do it?  Did it involve backspacing? 

SA
-- 
Stein Arild Strømme            +47 55584825, +47 95801887
Universitetet i Bergen                  Fax: +47 55589672     
Matematisk institutt, UiB     http://math.uib.no/stromme/         
Johs Brunsg 12, N-5008 BERGEN         stromme@math.uib.no

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 02.05.2007 um 11:01 schrieb Stein Arild Strømme:

> Were there Meta and Control keys there, or how did we do it?  Did  
> it involve backspacing?

I don't remember any Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift, or Backspace  
key on those teletype like IBM keyboards – how would you rub out  
punched holes?

--
Greetings

   Pete

"If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then  
the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
                                  -- Weinberg's Second Law

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Gordon Beaton]

On Wed, 2 May 2007 12:12:10 -0400, Gian Uberto Lauri wrote:
> More seriously: in some 1950  books I readed about blackening out with
> a pencil the place where a hole should have been. The blackening could
> be rubbedo  out. This made sense  where a punched card  was a "record"
> with columns (or groups of or even part of) being "fields".
>
> Graphite could be later sensed and use to drive the final punching...

When I was in school in the mid-1970's we had an HP 9830A that we
programmed using 80-column cards marked with a pencil, i.e. no holes
at all.

I didn't start using emacs until 1988 though, on TOPS-20.

/gordon

-- 

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Stein Arild Strømme]

[Peter Dyballa]

| Am 02.05.2007 um 11:01 schrieb Stein Arild Strømme:
| 
| > Were there Meta and Control keys there, or how did we do it?  Did
| > it involve backspacing?
| 
| I don't remember any Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift, or Backspace
| key on those teletype like IBM keyboards – how would you rub out
| punched holes?

I said backspace, not delete!  You could punch additional wholes into
the same column, creating other bytes than the built-in ones.

SA
-- 
Stein Arild Strømme            +47 55584825, +47 95801887
Universitetet i Bergen                  Fax: +47 55589672     
Matematisk institutt, UiB     http://math.uib.no/stromme/         
Johs Brunsg 12, N-5008 BERGEN         stromme@math.uib.no

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Stein Arild Strømme]

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

| Someone is going to bring up clay tables next.

Not me, I never used clay tablets myself.  I clearly remember using
chalk and blackboard, however.  (Actually, come to think of it, I'm
still using chalk and blackboard...  I miss C-h x C-w sometimes,
though.)

SA
-- 
Stein Arild Strømme            +47 55584825, +47 95801887
Universitetet i Bergen                  Fax: +47 55589672     
Matematisk institutt, UiB     http://math.uib.no/stromme/         
Johs Brunsg 12, N-5008 BERGEN         stromme@math.uib.no

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Stein Arild Strømme]

[Stein Arild Strømme]

| still using chalk and blackboard...  I miss C-h x C-w sometimes,
                                              ^^^^^^^^^

That should be C-x h C-w, of course.

SA
-- 
Stein Arild Strømme            +47 55584825, +47 95801887
Universitetet i Bergen                  Fax: +47 55589672     
Matematisk institutt, UiB     http://math.uib.no/stromme/         
Johs Brunsg 12, N-5008 BERGEN         stromme@math.uib.no

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Gian Uberto Lauri]

>>>>> "PD" == Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE> writes:

PD> Am 02.05.2007 um 11:01 schrieb Stein Arild Strømme:

>> Were there Meta and Control keys there, or how did we do it?  Did
>> it involve backspacing?

PD> I don't remember any Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift, or
PD> Backspace key on those teletype like IBM keyboards – how would you
PD> rub out punched holes?

Of course pick  some chaff and a bit of  glue. Experienced and careful
users used chips with the appropriate coluour and number.

"Cut'n'paste" is not a Xerox invention.

More seriously: in some 1950  books I readed about blackening out with
a pencil the place where a hole should have been. The blackening could
be rubbedo  out. This made sense  where a punched card  was a "record"
with columns (or groups of or even part of) being "fields".

Graphite could be later sensed and use to drive the final punching...

When  I found  the last  civil engineering  students operating  one of
those, a typing error meant a wasted card...

-- 
 /\           ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
  //--\| | \|  |   Integralista GNUslamico
\/                 e coltivatore diretto di Software

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Giacomo Graziosi]

On Apr 24, 7:07 am, 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
>
I'm 21, Emacs user since yesterday :-).

> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>
I tried _everything_ before Emacs, on junior high I played with Visual
Basic, on the first two years in high school I switched first to
Visual Studio, later on Delphi and C++ Builder. On the third year in
high school I discovered Linux and dropped all of the Windows stuff
and started to write code on simple editors like Gedit, Kate, ecc...
At the end of high school and on the university I looked for some
better environment and tried VIM, KDevelop, Anjuta, Netbeans and
Eclipse. I always found something that really bored me.
Now I just dropped Eclipse and started using Emacs: it looks good,
still I miss some features like "intellisense" and I need to configure
some things like session restoring.

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Hadron]

Giacomo Graziosi <g.graziosi@gmail.com> writes:

> On Apr 24, 7:07 am, 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> wrote:
>> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
>> you? I'm 32.
>>
> I'm 21, Emacs user since yesterday :-).
>
>> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
>> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
>> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>>
> I tried _everything_ before Emacs, on junior high I played with Visual
> Basic, on the first two years in high school I switched first to
> Visual Studio, later on Delphi and C++ Builder. On the third year in
> high school I discovered Linux and dropped all of the Windows stuff
> and started to write code on simple editors like Gedit, Kate, ecc...
> At the end of high school and on the university I looked for some
> better environment and tried VIM, KDevelop, Anjuta, Netbeans and
> Eclipse. I always found something that really bored me.
> Now I just dropped Eclipse and started using Emacs: it looks good,
> still I miss some features like "intellisense" and I need to configure

Google up cedet. I cant really quite "get it" but I assume it must work
since its there.

> some things like session restoring.
>

In my .emacs

 (desktop-save-mode)
 (desktop-read)

Google them up for the options available or put your cursor on them and
hit C-h f and then enter.

-- 

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ stromme@math.uib.no (Stein Arild Strømme):

| [Stein Arild Strømme]
|
| | still using chalk and blackboard...  I miss C-h x C-w sometimes,
|                                               ^^^^^^^^^
|
| That should be C-x h C-w, of course.

I use a wet sponge for this purpose.  Don't you?  Except that does not
put the killed text on the kill ring.  You can use a digital camera
for that.  Been there, done that.

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ stromme@math.uib.no (Stein Arild Strømme):

| I don't think even Harald used any version of emacs on those punch
| cards, although I seem to recall that he did some binary code
| programming, bypassing the assembler..

Not sure that I entered any actual machine code that way, but I think
I did enter some binary data in this fashion, yes.  I can no longer
remember why.  But I think I screwed it up by having a card in my deck
that was punched 7+8 in the first or second column, which was used in
the card reader to signify end-of-job.  Oops.

| Special tricks to enter non-ascii codes on those punching machines.
| Were there Meta and Control keys there, or how did we do it?  Did it
| involve backspacing?

Well, there was no ascii.  Each column had room for 12 holes being
from top to bottom +, -, and the digits 9-0 (in the /unlikely/ event
that I remember this correctly).  To punch several holes in one
column, you could just put a thumb on the card so it wouldn't advance,
and punch away.

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Gian Uberto Lauri]

>>>>> "SAS" == Stein Arild Strømme <stromme@math.uib.no> writes:

SAS> [Harald Hanche-Olsen] | Someone is going to bring up clay tables
SAS> next.

SAS> Not me, I never used clay tablets myself.

Hmmm... Here we used tablets with a thick wax cover on it. And yes, it
was a  later version of this editor,  but you know, Italy  was slow to
join the net...

-- 
 /\           ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
  //--\| | \|  |   Integralista GNUslamico
\/                 e coltivatore diretto di Software

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Ekkehard Görlach]

Petter Gustad <newsmail6@gustad.com> writes:

> Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:
>
>> Oh, come on.  Surely, I cannot be the only one here who's been using
>> punch cards?  Rhetorical question really; I know of one other at
>
> I used punched cards in 1981/1982. One of my first programs on the
> GOULD SEL machine I used for seismic signal processing was to replace
> the deck of seven cards to start the batch job and never have to use
> punched cards again. 
>

I remember punching cards in the late 70s to feed the CAE 90/40 in our
Physics institute. Punching cards, however, wasn't really my
favorite. I therefore looked for other ways to produce them. Finally I
managed to enter the programs and data into an (sort of) editor on a
Telefunken TR440 located in our data center only to let this machine
punch them out...

As for emacs: just turned 50 and started using it about twelve years
ago on a DEC OSF1 box when I did some lab automation work in mass
spectroscopy. Still using it every day.

Ekkehard

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Gian Uberto Lauri]

>>>>> "HH" == Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:

HH> Well, there was no ascii.  Each column had room for 12 holes being
HH> from top to bottom +, -, and the digits 9-0 (in the /unlikely/
HH> event that I remember this correctly).  To punch several holes in
HH> one column, you could just put a thumb on the card so it wouldn't
HH> advance, and punch away.

If it was the IBM one,  there where characters represented by a double
hole if I remember it correctly...

-- 
 /\           ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
  //--\| | \|  |   Integralista GNUslamico
\/                 e coltivatore diretto di Software

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[sixdegreepub]

On Apr 24, 1:07 pm, 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.
>
> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.
>
> That's only an assumption and I'd like to verify it. Would you please
> post your age if you're interested? The statistics could be
> interesting. :)


    I'm 15 and I began to use Emacs and Linux recently.
    Nobody around me are using either of them. I got to know something
about Linux, GNU, Emacs, then I was deeply attracted by them, for a
reason which I myself don't know exactly. I try to use them as often
as possible, even though I can't completely understand them. I
sometimes felt tired and difficult while using them, but I just
believe they are THE BEST, for an unknown reason. (I say that is
unknown, because I am not able to tell my classmates what its
advantage is. Also that is because I am not familiar with Emacs.)
    But I don't know whether it is good for me to use Emacs too early.
(I mean whether it is too difficult for me, a young boy, to use
Emacs.)
    I hope I could get some help about it.

(As I am still LEARNING ENGLISH, I hope to be forgiven for the
mistakes above, but please tell me to help me. And thanks to the Spell
Checking of Emacs.)

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() sixdegreepub@gmail.com
() 3 May 2007 22:54:45 -0700

   But I don't know whether it is good for me to use Emacs too early.

sometimes, before coffee (which i can only semi-recommend to
yet-to-be-addicted youth) emacs can be difficult to befriend.  another
solution to the "too early" problem is to stay up all night, hacking.
then emacs is the lullaby as you crash from sleep-deprivation.  but, oh
the dreams!

thi

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Sebastian Tennant]

Quoth GianUberto.Lauri@eng.it (Gian Uberto Lauri):
>>>>>> "s" == sixdegreepub  <sixdegreepub@gmail.com> writes:
>
> s>     I'm 15 and I began to use Emacs and Linux recently.  

This is probably one of the best decisions you will ever make!  Emacs
is probably the most universally useful program ever written.  It can
do virtually anything you tell it to.

Vis-a-vis the freedoms embodied in Emacs and Linux, this is also a
vitally important and again the choice you have made is the right one.

Any work you do within the world of free software will be of lasting
value for generations to come (if it's any good :-).  Proprietary
software has a shelf-life, just like every other commodity in the
marketplace.

You mayn't get rich SO quickly, but the fact is, with free software,
whether you're living in a damp basement apartment, living on pizza
and barely able to pay the rent, or earning lots of money working for
a multi-national corporation in shiny, modern offices in the centre of
the business district, you are never, ever, wasting your time.

> s> I say that is unknown, because  I am not able to tell my classmates
> s> what its advantage is.

Free software is better by design, implementaion, maintenance model,
and principle (and the folks who work on it are nicer :-)

In a year or two, the idea of paying money for crappy shrink-wrapped
brain-damaged software that doesn't let you tinker with it in any way
will astound you!

I recently saw an interesting DVD you might like to watch called
'Revolution OS'.  Get it from Amazon.  It features quite a lot of good
stuff, and it will introduce you to Richard Stallman, the visionary
founder of the Free Software Movement (and primary author of Emacs).

> s> Also that is because I am not familiar with Emacs.
>
> There is always something to learn with Emacs :).

This is very true.

> You will learn  that Emacs can work for you as  opposed to require you
> to manouver it over and over again...
>
> Start with C-x ( and C-x ).

In case you're confused, that's 'C-x (' and 'C-x )', but I'm not sure
if keyboard macros are the best place to start.

Congratulations.  I guarantee you will never look back.

Sebastian

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Gian Uberto Lauri]

>>>>> "s" == sixdegreepub  <sixdegreepub@gmail.com> writes:

s>     I'm 15 and I began to use Emacs and Linux recently.  

Oh,  wise boy!  You did  a smart  choiche, not  only because  they are
powerful, but also because they are Free (as in Freedom).

s> I say that is unknown, because  I am not able to tell my classmates
s> what its advantage is.

First of all there are the four freedoms:

0) You are free to use them  as you wish, without limits. Those who do
   not use Free Software have their  programs bound to be used on only
   one machine at a time  (or worse) and preinstalled operative system
   are often licensed  for a specific computer (you  can't use them on
   another computer, even if the previous one is wrecked).

1) You are  free to see how  they are built, learn how  to change them
   and do the changes you need. Knowing how some programs are build is
   totally impossible to do.

2) You can distribute copies. With proprietary software this is called
   piracy... 

3) You  can distribute your own  changes. Even if you  manage to patch
   some proprietary  software, it's unlikely you  can redistribute the
   patch (forget about the software itself)

s> Also that is because I am not familiar with Emacs.

There is always something to learn with Emacs :).

You will learn  that Emacs can work for you as  opposed to require you
to manouver it over and over again...

Start with C-x ( and C-x ).

-- 
 /\           ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
  //--\| | \|  |   Integralista GNUslamico
\/                 e coltivatore diretto di Software

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Xavier Maillard]

Hi,

   I recently saw an interesting DVD you might like to watch called
   'Revolution OS'.  Get it from Amazon.  It features quite a lot of good

Amazon ? Are you sure ? :)[1]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html

Have a nice day.

Xavier

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 5/5/07, Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> wrote:

> Amazon ? Are you sure ? :)[1]
>
> [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html

>From that page: "The FSF decided to end its boycott of Amazon in
September 2002. (We forgot to edit this page at the time.)"

             Juanma

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Xavier Maillard]

   On 5/5/07, Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> wrote:

   > Amazon ? Are you sure ? :)[1]
   >
   > [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html

   >From that page: "The FSF decided to end its boycott of Amazon in
   September 2002. (We forgot to edit this page at the time.)"
 
Yes I know, but Amazon patents still exist, that's what I wanted
to "show".

Xavier

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 5/6/07, Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> wrote:

> Yes I know, but Amazon patents still exist, that's what I wanted
> to "show".

Then it would've been clearer to point to a page titled "Amazon
patents" that to one with "Boycott Amazon" whose first paragraph
explains that the boycott ended :)

             Juanma

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Sebastian Tennant]

Quoth "Juanma Barranquero" <lekktu@gmail.com>:
> On 5/5/07, Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> Amazon ? Are you sure ? :)[1]
>>
>> [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html
>
>>From that page: "The FSF decided to end its boycott of Amazon in
> September 2002. (We forgot to edit this page at the time.)"
>
>             Juanma

Thanks for the information Xavier.

Juanma, the FSF may have decided to end its boycott but clearly we
should remain on the lookout:

"Amazon has [acquired] a number of other menacing patents since then,
 but has not yet used them aggressively..."

Sebastian

Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 5/6/07, Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com> wrote:

> Juanma, the FSF may have decided to end its boycott but clearly we
> should remain on the lookout:

Yes, of course.

             Juanma