On Sep 9, 2004, at 8:54 PM, Doug McNutt wrote:
I am told, by my son, that the best replacement for MPW in OS neXt is really emacs but it requires that I learn smalltalk or something similar and, though I have read the book, I just ain't there. X11 isn't that easy to use either with my four monitors.
I think there are a few mismatches in that paragraph. I think MPW is most analogous to the shell itself, not to emacs. I'm a happy longtime "power-user" of emacs, though I've never taught myself Lisp (which is what you meant to say, not Smalltalk). I just use emacs for editing the text, and when I want to run commands I hit control-z and run a perl one-liner, or a 'wc' command, or whatever. Then, since I have "bindkey ^Z run-fg-editor" in my .login file, I just hit control-z again to drop me back into my editor. I almost never use emacs' shell integration, or write lisp functions, because I find the parent shell a more powerful tool. And this way I get the environment benefits you mentioned too.
I'm not sure why X11 got mentioned there either, since you can use emacs & the shell without X11 (it's probably been months since I used X11 under OS X).
When I'm working with text that's heavily structured, like code or delimited data files, I usually plunge into the shell & emacs. For other stuff I usually fire up BBEdit. Getting comfortable with both is really handy. =)
-Ken
