Re: OT -- An extremely dumb curiosity question?

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

William Case <billlinux@rogers.com> writes:

> Hi;
>
> What are all you people doing with emacs ?
>
> I took an early retirement and now spend most of my time in a nicely
> fixed up den or office in the basement, on my computer using Fedora Core
> 6.  I am learning and exploring computers more and more every day.  I
> love it; I have come to firmly believe computers should be for the older
> and not the young.
>
> The point of my question is I use emacs to write an occasional bash
> script or a small C program.  I screw around with beginners level lisp
> and watch things not work.  But as I read the posts on the mailing list
> it is obvious emacs is being used for much much more.  Sometimes it
> seems it has replaced the Gnome or KDE desktop.  Outside of programming,
> I am having trouble imagining why people would use it.  Do you use it
> full screen all the time; only in a terminal or a virtual terminal?  Is
> it the only program you have running at start up with everything else
> being done by command line?  
>
> I ask here because none of my friends have any idea what I am talking
> about.
>
> This is a casual chatty question not to be taken too seriously, but if
> some of you are taking a break from your real work, I would be really
> interested in knowing just what people really do with it.  Emacs I mean.
>

I use emacs as my primary interface to the computer because I'm a blind user.
An example of the power of emacs is the package emacspeak. This is a package
which provides full speech feedback for users who are unable to read the
screen. The alternative to using emacs and emacspeak would be to use a screen
reader, but in comparison to emacspeak, screen readers are rather "dumb". 

As an example, emacspeak uses "voice lock mode", which is similar to font locak
mode, but instead of representing different bits of text with different fonts
and colours, voice lock uses different voices, changes in pitch and sound icons
to provide additional contextual clues via auditory means in a manner similar
to font locks use of colours and fonts to represent different textual
properties. font lock might represent bold text using a bold version of the
font while emacspeak might represent that test by speaking it in a louder or
different voice etc. 

I also do a lot of authoring and programming. Emacs is a wonderful environment
for this. I use AucTex to write high quality documents and various programming
modes to create a productive integrated development environment. The w3m-el
package gives me an integrated web browser (there is also w3, but it is
severely lacking in sufficient developers to keep pace with the rapidly
evolving web world), various good mail readers and the wonderful Gnus (which is
what I'm using now) for reading newsgroups, mail and rss. I also use many other
very useful emacs modes, such as emms for managing and playing audio content
(music, podcasts, streaming audio etc), planner mode for managing my projects,
planning activities, tracking time spent on tasks and collating information,
bbdb as an address/contact database and muse for creating documents in multiple
formats quickly and easily (bloxsom blog, web pages, pdf, texinfo, docbook
etc). I also use emacs' tramp mode to edit files on remote systems easily and
securely.

However, probably what I like best about emacs is that I can pretty much
customize it to do what I want. if i can't find an existing package to do what
I want, I can use elisp to write one or if I don't like the behavior in a
particular package, Ic an modify it using elisp functions like defadvice. I can
easily automate common tasks using a bit of elisp or a macro, which i can then
bind to a key for easy execution. Essentially, emacs gives me a powerful
programmable interface which I can configure to work the way I like rather than
having to learn a heap of different applications, some of which will have bits
I don't like and probably won't be able to change easily, if at all.

I should say that my initial attempts to learn emacs failed. this was before I
lost my sight and when I was a dedicated vi user. However, after being forced
to learn emacs (for emacspeak), I found that once I was over the learning
curve, I really began to like it moe and more. Now I cannot imagine working in
any other environment. One thing I really like is the support for the keyborad
and the fact there isn't anything you can do with the mouse you can't do with
the keybord. I think mice are an inefficient interface mechanism and believe I
can work faster using the keyboard than most mouse users. Marking the region
and using keys to cut/copy/paste is very fast an efficient. Having as many apps
working from inside emacs as possible means I can easily cut/copy and paste
between applications and never even think about the darn rodent!

regards,

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au