Emacs ad (was Re: [gNewSense-users] Good work!)

[Bake Timmons]

> Thanks for the work you did on the KDE section.  Nice one!  Did you
> find some clever Emacs way of doing things?

You're welcome.  There is likely a clever Emacs way of doing anything,
and part of my work on a new Emacs "PFV" mode will be intended to be
yet another demonstration of the all-embracing power of Emacs.

The "work" I did on that section was more trivial than I had in mind
for the mode and shows room for yet more automation.  The mode gives a
WYSIWYG interface to editing a (new or existing) table at a given URL
which it then converts to markup.  The hardest part is making the UI
useful yet unobtrusive.  I am eager to address with this mode anyone's
pet peeves on the PFV process.

I will do some more work on it and post it here in a few days.  I only
hope that more free software users will appreciate Emacs in a more
timely way than me.  I have used it on and off for years, but only
recently have I realized its power: what a wise (and fun!) investment
it is.  It is a remarkable marriage of an easy Lisp dialect and a rich
UI that has benefitted from decades of use, reflection, and
improvement: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html

If you have, say, a half hour to spend sometime, do take a fun tour:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

Another way of looking at it is that it has been and will continue to
be a central interface to GNU software and that RMS himself works on
it nearly every day.  Perhaps what finally convinced me to plunge in
was the fine Emacs Lisp tutorial.  Although the tutorial is on the
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/emacs-lisp-intro.html
page and is in book form, the best online use of it IMO is to just
take it from within Emacs itself.  E.g., install the emacs and
emacs-lisp-intro packages.  You can easily read it and evaluate its
example code from within your Emacs session itself.

What distinguishes this tutorial from perl, python, etc. materials is
what distinguishes Emacs itself: the *interface* of Emacs.  The
tutorial is, in part, a gentle introduction to playing with this
interface.  This intro was good enough to keep me engaged, despite my
familiarity with Lisp.