Re: Failing to see the allure of Emacs

[Daniel]

Thanks for all the help!  Any other nuggets I'd really appreciate.
The entire impetus for looking into emacs is b/c the programmers that
I really am in awe of seem to really use it.  These days everywhere
you turn there's a new GUI or language to learn, and I want to make
sure that emacs will ultimately lessen the number of things that I
need to learn in the future.

On Mar 21, 5:00 pm, "akai...@visi.com" <akai...@visi.com> wrote:
> 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.