Re: I wrote a mini manual for Emacs

[MBR <mbr@arlsoft.com>]

Good work!

I'd like to say something about the section ""I don't want a complicated 
'editor', I want something simple like Notepad(++)" in which you talk 
about IDEs.  When I started using Emacs (after about 10 years of using 
vi), I immediately noticed that Emacs was very different from any other 
editor I'd ever worked with.  With all other editors, I'd use them for 
editing text and do everything else from a shell prompt.

But once I started using Emacs I started telling people, "Emacs isn't an 
editor, it's a way of life!"  What I meant by that was that I found I 
was starting up a single instance of Emacs in the morning, and virtually 
everything I did the rest of the day was done inside Emacs.  If I needed 
to run a shell command, I'd do that inside an Emacs shell buffer because 
that way the command's output was automatically captured in the buffer 
and I could then use it like any other text - comparing it to other 
things with compare-window, searching for regular expressions in the 
output, saving some interesting portion of the output by simply copying 
it to a file, etc., etc.

Besides being able to run a shell inside the "editor", you could run 
your compiler and linker straight from Emacs and have it parse and 
highlight any errors; you could debug your code inside Emacs with gdb 
and later gud, and have many added benefits over running gdb directly 
from the shell.  One of those benefits is having it show you the source 
code, including a pointer showing what line of code you're about to execute.

The bottom line is that Emacs actually is an IDE, not merely a text 
editor.  It just happens to be an IDE that works on a dumb terminal. As 
a matter of fact, it's the original IDE! It existed before any of the 
GUI-style IDEs existed, and many features commonly found in IDEs were 
copied from Emacs.

So, it wouldn't hurt to emphasize at the beginning of your Mini Manual 
that Emacs should not be thought of as an editor.  It is a software 
development environment with powerful text editing capabilities.  And 
it's much more than even that!

    Mark Rosenthal

On 6/16/14 1:24 AM, Tu Do wrote:
>   Hi everyone,
>
> I wrote an Emacs Mini Manual for complete beginners to be productive with
> Emacs common tools without having to look all over the manual. It provides
> a starting point before reading the full Emacs manual. Folow this link: Why
> This Guide? <http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html#sec-2> to read it
> fully.
>
> I hope it will be useful for new people switching to Ubuntu and want to
> have a nice development environment. If you find mistakes, please report it
> to me. If you think I'm missing commonly used tools or some idiomatic uses
> of Emacs, please tell me.
>
> Thanks
>