Emacs

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Apr-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| On 11 April 2011 20:34, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| > What program do you use for editing text files?
| 
| Lest the words of community leader and commander-in-chief of the GNU
| Octave forces be misinterpreted, I would like to reassure everyone
| that normally the Emacs faith does not actively seek converts. Brother
| John is clearly only trying to stimulate meditation and introspection
| with this line of questioning.

Yes, I'm not trying to convert.  I don't really care what editor you
use, or whether you switch to Emacs.  But given the current
discussion, I am curious to know what editor you use if it is not
Emacs and if you found it easy to learn and what it was that made the
learning easy.  Maybe the other alternatives are no easier, it is just
that it was what you learned, you were motivated to do so, and in
time, you thought it was easy. Probably that is what happened for me
as well.  Although Emacs was far from the first text editor I used, it
was among the first I used seriously, day after day.  The other
editors I used before that were WordStar (lots of control key
commands, similar to Emacs) or DEC's EDT on a VMS system (I'm glad I
don't really remember much about this one) or they were line oriented
(similar to the one true editor, ed).

But I do get tired of hearing that Emacs is somehow hard to learn when
I'm going to bet that other editors with similar capabilities are not
really that much easier.

jwe