Re: OT -- An extremely dumb curiosity question?

[Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com>]

William Case <billlinux@rogers.com> writes:

> Hi;
>
> What are all you people doing with emacs ?

Everything.

Including coffee! 

http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:rFz1-BnQCfEJ:www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/coffee.el+coffee.el&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1


> 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.  

There are a lot of programs running in emacs, web, ftp, mail, news,
spreadsheets, games, file management, databases, MP3 and movie
players, etc.  And indeed, there are a couple of IDE for programmers.

But mostly, the only applications I run beside emacs are one xterm
(with screen(1)), Firefox, since there remains a lot of web sites that
don't work too well with only w3m, and an occasional Acroreader.

For applications, you can consider emacs as a user interface layer.
Some programs are structured this way, with an engine working in an
"inferior" process, and the user interface written in emacs.
For example, PVS http://pvs.csl.sri.com/


> 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 use GNU emacs on X usually (occasionnaly in xterm or PuTTY, mostly
for remote sessions).

Usually, I've got two emacs frames dividing screen space in two.  
I've got a few commands to position the frames automatically, and even
optionnally moving the X window decorations out of screen, so only
emacs pixels can be seen.

See maximize-frame, full-frame, etc in:
http://darcs.informatimago.com/darcs/public/emacs/pjb-emacs.el
http://darcs.informatimago.com/darcs/public/emacs


> 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.

There are also various IRC client in emacs, like ERC: 
http://delysid.org/emacs/erc.html
which allows you to chat on line eg. in irc://irc.freenode.org/#emacs

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
Until real software engineering is developed, the next best practice
is to develop with a dynamic system that has extreme late binding in
all aspects. The first system to really do this in an important way
is Lisp. -- Alan Kay