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On 13 Jun 1998, Robin S. Socha wrote:
| * 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.

Actually, there is comp.emacs as well which is probably more widely
propagated.
 
| > 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 ]:->

Note that one does not *have* to use it as a shell. While I am not terribly
surprised that it is possible to do so, I would not recommend this. Under
non-Unix OS's I would not be surprised if this were much more difficult.

| > 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

There also exists html-helper-mode, which I use a modified version of, and
has most of the same features, if you want them.
 
| > 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.

Yes, Emacs has a GUI if you compile it in. Personally, I can't stand the
GUI. (The fact that my keyboard or some other hardware generates spurious
'q' keystrokes in X does not help any.)

That said, there is every reason to ditch MS Word as a HTML tool, even if
you don't necessarily  for Emacs. The "HTML" generated by MS Word is
terrible from what I understand, and it's damn luck getting it to even
produce a valid HTML document, much less one that is actually usable.

| > 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.

I don't get what it is about the mouse that makes it so much easier for a
computer to use. I mean, it's fine for stuff like gpm and stuff that
actually *needs* the GUI to be halfway usable but to use it for stuff better
done in text mode, at least to me, seems to be an exercise in frustration. I
mean, yikes, even my mother (who is as anti-MS as I am) needs education on
how to do things in Excel using the keyboard and is amazed when I do it 10
times faster than she does using the 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?

Question: what exactly does this do (the M-x ... part)?

| 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/>

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn - skquinn(at)wt.net - please consider visiting my home page
at http://purl.oclc.org/net/skquinn/personal
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