From: "akaiser@visi.com" <akaiser@visi.com>
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Failing to see the allure of Emacs
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:00:30 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <Sf2dnQCyQaR2FTvWnZ2dnUVZ8nWdnZ2d@posted.visi> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <df2194df-0041-4105-940e-dad55ceaec35@30g2000yqi.googlegroups.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.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-03-21 21:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 55+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-03-21 19:02 Failing to see the allure of Emacs Daniel
2010-03-21 20:22 ` David Kastrup
2010-03-21 20:47 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon
2010-03-21 21:00 ` akaiser [this message]
2010-03-21 21:26 ` Daniel
2010-03-21 22:16 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon
2010-03-22 4:05 ` Uday S Reddy
2010-03-21 22:21 ` David Kastrup
2010-03-23 17:22 ` akaiser
2010-03-23 17:52 ` Jeff Clough
2010-03-23 19:10 ` akaiser
2010-03-23 19:32 ` Uday S Reddy
2010-03-23 23:00 ` David Kastrup
2010-03-24 21:40 ` Tim X
2010-03-24 22:00 ` akaiser
2010-03-25 0:28 ` Jason Rumney
2010-03-25 1:03 ` Jay Belanger
2010-03-25 1:27 ` despen
2010-03-25 8:42 ` Tim X
2010-03-25 9:19 ` akaiser
2010-03-25 10:01 ` David Kastrup
2010-03-25 10:09 ` akaiser
2010-03-27 20:59 ` Giorgos Keramidas
2010-04-07 5:36 ` David Kastrup
2010-03-25 9:41 ` akaiser
2010-03-25 12:17 ` Tim Landscheidt
2010-03-25 12:24 ` akaiser
2010-05-04 19:03 ` Lennart Borgman
[not found] ` <mailman.28.1272999835.29092.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
2010-05-05 7:15 ` David Kastrup
2010-05-05 20:40 ` Stefan Monnier
2010-03-25 12:45 ` Jay Belanger
2010-03-25 18:31 ` Uday S Reddy
2010-03-25 14:07 ` Ted Zlatanov
2010-03-25 14:49 ` David Kastrup
2010-03-26 4:14 ` Galen Boyer
2010-05-05 17:27 ` Joel J. Adamson
2010-03-21 21:02 ` Jeff Clough
2010-03-21 22:09 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon
2010-03-21 22:35 ` B. T. Raven
2010-03-21 22:45 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon
2010-03-22 0:21 ` Jeff Clough
2010-03-22 4:45 ` B. T. Raven
2010-05-22 2:38 ` Joseph Brenner
2010-03-21 22:58 ` John Bokma
2010-04-20 13:04 ` Jim Diamond
2010-04-20 17:15 ` Andreas Politz
2010-04-20 17:34 ` Jeff Clough
2010-04-21 14:26 ` Jim Diamond
2010-04-20 17:36 ` Glenn Morris
2010-04-21 14:31 ` Jim Diamond
2010-04-21 18:23 ` Stefan Monnier
2010-04-22 15:27 ` Uday S Reddy
2010-04-20 22:37 ` Tim X
2010-03-21 22:41 ` despen
2010-03-22 11:59 ` Stefan Kamphausen
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=Sf2dnQCyQaR2FTvWnZ2dnUVZ8nWdnZ2d@posted.visi \
--to=akaiser@visi.com \
--cc=djc@resiak.org \
--cc=help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this external index
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.