Re: emacs vs vs.net

[Tim X <timx@spamto.devnul.com>]

>>>>> "William" == William Shieh <gwshieh@hotmail.com> writes:

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

Don't know what vs.net is, but I avoid MS based mail clients simply to
avoid virus problems. 

Most people go for emacs because, rather than having to adjust how you
want to do things to fit with the software, emacs makes it easy to
adjust the software to work the way you want. I also hate using a
mouse as I find it slower than using keyboard shortcuts. To mark a
region, copy and past, you simply move to the beginning of the region,
hit ctrl-space move to the end of the region, hit alt-w (for copy) or
ctl-w (to cut), move to where you want to paste and hit ctl-y. Add in
the shortcuts to move by word/sentence/sexp/paragraph etc and moving
from begining of the region to the end is quick and easy. If you don't
like alt-w/ctl-w ctl-y etc, you can re-bind them. 

The power of emacs is in the reference to it being an "extensible"
editor - e.g. you can pretty much add whatever functionality you have
the imagination to create (via elisp etc). In practice, you can get by
with very little elisp skill as more often than not, the feature you
want has already been created by someone else and made available on
the net.

Tim


-- 
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you 
really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!