Re: OT -- An extremely dumb curiosity question?

[Hadron <hadronquark@gmail.com>]

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.

email and news : gnus, sendmail, pgg
irc : erc
task organization : planner & muse
html : html-helper
web publishing : ftp
programming : cc-mode, c-scope, etags, ecb, semantic
debugging : gdb

Why? because you dont really need GUI for any of that : and its great to
have everything you use regularly tied in to the same system with
concistent key bindings and "approach".

emacs takes some getting used to but when you start to get used to it,
you being to wonder why you would ever use a GUI desktop.

I have a little project lined up where finally I will learn some elisp.

And, as an added bonus, emacs has a great, friendly community.