Re: Emacs-Shop

[Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com>]

Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@online.de> writes:

> Hi,

> Some non-free editors are ahead in certain areas,
> because they offer special tailored features.
> Basically Emacs may deliver that likewise - all together
> and finally even better.

I am sure there are buyers (I mean corporate buyers) for source
editors. 'Source Insight' - http://www.sourceinsight.com/ - I suppose is
one such popular editor. I have seen it being used in many of the shop
that I had worked with. I do love that editor. (OK, not all folks are
monogomous!)

I wish Emacs had semantic search capabilities.

For example, when I am on a line like this:

       obj->get()

and search for get, I would very much want the search results be
strictly limited to only the "applicable" classes depending on how obj
is declared. (You know what I mean!) Searching for get accessor using
grep, etags, cscope or ebrowse even will invariably overwhelm the user.

Even though I have not worked on object-oriented code bases extensively,
I had to get past the above wall everytime I had to look at OO code. 

With CEDET I think the situation might have improved wrt context-based
searches. I haven't yet had an excuse to try CEDET.

Furthermore based on my own observation, many of my colleagues use vim
as opposed to Emacs. 

I think there are many challenges wrt selling Emacs to enterprises. When
there are off-the-shelf editors like the one mentioned above that are
readily usable the challenge only becomes much more formidable.

Btw, one common complain about Emacs is that it is difficult to
learn. This is one big lie. The real truth is that people are too lazy
to spend half-a-day of effort training themselves via the tutorial.

So sell Emacs but don't call it Emacs.

There was a mention of viability of selling Orgmode commercially
somewhere in this thread. I was reminded of the following post:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2011-04/msg00173.html

I wonder the seeker found what he sought and got enlightened!

Good luck with your new initiative. I am sure you would no longer say
that you don't have a teacher.

Jambunathan K.


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