Re: Emacs and Lynx Browser

[florian@fsavigny.de (Florian v. Savigny)]

  > Pascal c <pch.netz@gmail.com> writes:
  > 
  > > I'm starting to learn Emacs. It's not easy but I can already
  > > feel how intresting it is.

Good instinct. ;-) (No - I mean it.)

  > There are some great books for you to pick up. I read the 1988 manual
  > by Richard Stallman and also a modern book called "Learning GNU
  > Emacs". 

You probably mean the green-white one published by O'Reilly? (By Debra
Whatshername, and a guy - maybe even Eric Raymond, originally?). That
was the one that got me hooked back in about 1998, so I would also
recommend it (a factor to consider, however, might be how new the
latest edition is. But then, even an outdated one might help a
lot.). Since then, Emacs has been the centre of practically everything
for me.

  > In many general-purpose GNU/Linux introductions, there are
  > chapters on Emacs, but those typically only cover what you already
  > know: cursor movements, filling paragraphs, splitting windows... That's
  > why getting "Emacs only" books is something I benefited from, a lot.

Interestingly, there are comparatively few Emacs books around, which
is surprising given the stellar respectability the program has earned,
and its versatility. (Compare that to the number of Perl books around
- it's striking, isn't it? I once took Damian Conway's "Perl Best
Practices" and started to apply them to Elisp, because much was
transferable.)

The nice thing about the O'Reilly book is that it does a modest amount
of advertising Emacs. I still remember one thing they kept mentioning:
That it was integration that made Emacs so interesting. This is still
true fifteen years later. The manual, as far as I know it, is
"dryer". Nevertheless, I would say it is also worth reading in
print. If you like to program, the Introduction into Emacs Lisp by
Robert Cha... (forgotten the rest) is also not bad.

Later, you discover so much well-done self-documentation and
-demonstration (C-h f, C-h F, C-h C-h, C-x C-e, C-j in the *scratch*
buffer, and edebug-defun) that reading becomes increasingly
unnecessary.

(Sorry if that was trivial for most. I just could not resist relating
the essence of my own experience. Over the years, Emacs has helped me
enormously in two very different jobs - translator and teacher -, and
that was because I could always tweak it to do what I wanted. It
allows you to do those simple things that you normally only imagine.)

Best, 

Florian