Re: Failing to see the allure of Emacs

["akaiser@visi.com" <akaiser@visi.com>]

Daniel, emacs is a superb text editor; for why that is, you can either take 
everyone's opinion or you can go to some 1970's and 1980's-era studies of 
the ergonomics and cognitive demands of text editing.  Simply put, emacs 
gets it.  Most other editors only halfway get it.

But to see what's so superb about emacs you must get to know its 
extraordinarily powerful macro facility and its programmability.  emacs 
incorporates an entire programming environment which can control everything 
it can do and every datatype it can handle -- subprocesses, windows, 
sockets, lists, numbers, arrays, strings (which are vectors), etc.  Once 
you can get your hands on that -- and I doubt you can do it in only 48 
hours -- you'll never want to go back.

Let's say you're proficient with bash.  Okay: with emacs you can run a bash 
subshell and write macros and programs that can operate on the bash shell 
environment in relationship to things you're doing in multiple other 
windows and multiple other buffers.  emacs can do this in your choice of 
character set.

I wouldn't call myself an emacs guru, but I've been using it for 30 years, 
and although I've tried out other editors, none of them compares to emacs 
in terms of power, flexibility, and programmability.  When I find one that 
can, I'll switch to it, but by now that seems unlikely.  In those areas 
emacs doesn't just occupy the high ground: it owns the whole damned mountain.

djc

PS I find that for my purposes emacs falls short in two areas: the ability 
to handle arbitrarily large files efficiently, and documentation.  How I'd 
love to see complete, up to date, readily usable documentation!  If that 
existed, this newsgroup would see less traffic.