Re: Should I use EMACS?

<yaddayadda>
I've rearranged this mail to make it understandable. Do you folks
*really* have to include every singly mail uncommented at the bottom
of you reply including signature and all? This list isn't exactly low
traffic and this behaviour is really, really wasting massive amounts
of bandwidth. Not to mention that signatures should be separated from
the message body by "-- \n" *sigh*
</yaddayadda>

* Kayla Block <kblock(at)placeware.com> writes:
>> At 08:38 PM 6/12/98 +0100, David Meadows wrote:

>> EMACS has been favourably mentioned in recent posts to various HWG
>> lists.  I'm afraid I know nothing of it, but it seems to be highly
>> recommended by it's users.

Sure. We even have our own newsgroups like alt.religion.emacs.

>> So now I'm wondering why it has such a fanatical following. Can
>> somebody who uses it to write HTML documents tell me something
>> about it and explain why they think it's so good?

> Emacs is a powerful and extensible (programmatically and through
> adding in new modes) text editor that is practically an operating
> system by itself.  

Ummmm... not quite but:
robin@sushi:/home/robin > echo $SHELL
/usr/local/bin/xemacs-21.0-b42
Yep ]:->

> It has a steep learning curve, but imo is well worth it. 

Jehova. That goes true for any U*ix tool, mainly because "easy to use"
is yet another synonym for "inflexible, limited and probably crashy".

> It has various modes including several versions of HTML mode. (I
> don't personally find HTML mode useful, but I do use Emacs as one of
> my web development tools).

I use it with html-mode and hm--html-minor-mode. This combination
rocks, because you get:

       o syntax highlighting
       o syntax validation
       o indenting
       o shortcuts for every conceivable tag
       o tight integration of sgml

blablabla... Check it out:
<http://franck.pc.uni-koeln.de/~robin/xemacs.html#scrshot> Besides,
it's got all those nifty little packages (like htmlize by Hrvoje
Niksic that allows you to put syntactically highlighted code on the
web just like that:
<http://franck.pc.uni-koeln.de/~robin/pine-tips_w.html#procmail>) I
find this particularly helpful for putting CGI scripts on the web
because they become so much more readable.

>> Specifically, can somebody give a solid reason for me to switch
>> from MS Word(7) to EMACS? If it's so good, what will it offer me
>> that Word doesn't?
>>
> To be able to use it at a newbie level isnt too difficult. There is
> really no way to compare MSWord to Emacs. One is a word processor,
> the other is a highly extensible and programmable text editor geared
> towards programmers.  One would never replace the other...they are
> completely different creatures.

Well, quit true, but... there is one reason everybody should switch
from Word to XEmacs, but it has nothing to do with HTML. It's LaTeX
and it will allow you to prepare beautiful documents with a flick
of the wrist. It will also allow you to prepare 5000 pages long
documents with 1000s of tables, pictures and bibliography entries
without ever crashing. And the quality of the output should put the
morons in Redmond to shame from here to eternity. That said, I
would like to point out that it /does/ have something to do with
HTML, especially if you're preparing large documentations - check
latex2html with which I converted the pine user guide.

>> There is a Windows 95 port of EMACS, right? (I understand that some
>> of you are very anti-MS Windows, but please humour me and assume
>> that I can't switch to UNIX because my place of work is committed
>> to Windows.)
>>
> If you are comfortable using the tools you are using, I would tend to
> suggest sticking to them. Though there is a windows port (and Mac),
> it is very much a unix type of tool with a unix type interface. If
> you're not a command line type person, you probably won't like it.

Not. Emacs and XEmacs <http://www.xemacs.org/> are nowhere near a CLI
tool. Recent versions of XEmacs (which, I'm afraid don't run under
Dos95, but do run under NT if you got a C-compiler) are very much
clicky-clicky including a user-interface for customizing.

> Kayla (thinking this may not have been the answer you were looking
> for....)

Business as usual. Never think the user to be stupid, but merely lost
and confused. Word is *not* easy to use just because you can chase
that queer paper clip around the screen with a mouse, and XEmacs is
not hard to use just because you can use it without ever touching a
mouse. Tell me: had you rather go "grab mouse, open 3 menues, open and
close 4 dialogs, switch to the keyboard again, grab the mouse again,
click some more" or just M-x hm--html-add-description-title-and-entry[1]
and hit RET?

Finally: XEmacs comes with the news and mailreader that made this
lovely mail possible - Gnus. Ever wanted to be cool like the guys that
don't screw up citation levels, have proper linewidths, don't have
v-cards and generally rock? Go 4 it: <http://www.gnus.org/> 

Robin

Footnotes: 
[1]  BTW, ever tried lightning completion? You'll love it:
     <http://www.nd.edu/~jpalmier/Ultra/> Lightning completion is an
     improvement on whatever completion emacs does already; it
     incorporates "dynamic completion": completion without having to
     hit the TAB key or anything else.  This is very useful when added
     to commands like find-file or switch-to-buffer or
     describe-lisp-function.

-- 
Robin S. Socha     Join the Fight: <http://www.enemy.org/>
Program call to load Windows: "Here_piggy_piggy_piggy"

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