From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "akaiser@visi.com" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Failing to see the allure of Emacs Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:00:30 +0100 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: djc@resiak.org NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1272996347 31648 80.91.229.12 (4 May 2010 18:05:47 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 18:05:47 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue May 04 20:05:46 2010 connect(): No such file or directory Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1O9MV4-0000zA-7x for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 04 May 2010 20:05:42 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:38017 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1O9MV3-0000a7-NI for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 04 May 2010 14:05:41 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!news.glorb.com!news2.glorb.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.posted.visi!news.posted.visi.POSTED!not-for-mail Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:00:27 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Thunderbird/3.0.3 Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help In-Reply-To: Original-Lines: 31 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.221.65.147 Original-X-Trace: sv3-sN8phkIysdMfpzt+o2hFG4bQwBTSY2sKQilYSFKpRwq2mFHSqoSV6c/e7FxNwVxPibKw0OP8J9EyirE!0VqVlph45/Oh8bz5P5B59ZwUMMXTRDMBiijtM8DtljQWuB+cGmtqwOGM4ZgOzlq3ijwg5BY5dUiN!f7kcOCsG8pA= Original-X-Complaints-To: abuse@visi.com X-DMCA-Complaints-To: abuse@visi.com X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:177522 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:73018 Archived-At: 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.