"Zak B. Elep" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Shouldn't the guys at FSF make a guide to Emacs, or something like > that? I'm attracted to it, but I still use vim for most things,
There are guides. In fact, it's among the best-documented pieces of software I know (which probably doesn't say much). It tries to be self-documenting. As a package maintainer, I try to do that too. However, Emacs requires a few rather difficult braintwisting paradigm shifts. For example: - Leave your editor open. Don't close and reopen it for every single file. People who complain about Emacs' startup times are using it like they'd use vi: open, close, open, close... Opening it once and leaving it open works. - It's okay for a piece of software to try to do more than one thing. People who follow the Unix philosophy strictly think of Emacs as a bloated text editor. After all, under that philosophy, it's just supposed to be a text editor. Emacs probably wouldn't even very good at being a text editor if it didn't have all those extra modules, and strangely, being able to do my mail, news, IRC, web browsing, and planning all in one app appeals to me. I think of Emacs more as an environment than as a single app. - Emacs could probably be used as a glorified typewriter, but nano, joe, and jed are probably easier to use for that purpose. vim has funkier syntax highlighting built in. So why use Emacs at all? I like the way Emacs fits itself to me. <grin> I'm crazy enough to want that. > Now, we have Linux, we have GNOME and KDE, we have Windows and Mac > OS X, we have a whole bunch of OSes and their accompanying > tools/apps/warez, all implementing things that have been done before That's true. I suppose duplication and fragmentation can't be avoided when you start making choices. Heck, GNU Emacs and XEmacs differ in terms of architecture, making comparative emacsology rather difficult. I do regularly look at other PIMs to steal ideas and implement them in planner.el, and I have fun customizing planner for people's particular quirks. =) Even in the niche world of Emacs PIMs, I find my userbase is different enough from the userbase of another tool. (I can talk about non-Emacs stuff if people are getting freaked out, but I do hope you'll forgive me. It's the environment I do most of my OSS development on and for. =) ) -- Sacha Chua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Ateneo CS faculty geekette interests: emacs, gnu/linux, making computer science education fun http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
