[Herefordshire] Having a blonde moment!!!!

[Mark Broadbent]

Ben Stephens wrote:
> Does anyone here use Emacs? What do you use it for? Was it difficult to learn?

I use Xemacs, but I believe the difference is political not technical. 
I great for programming as Andrew said as I pretty much formats the code 
for you, so it picks up all the obvious missing braces type errors 
immediately and forces your code formatting to be consistent.  For me 
the best feature (for programming) is pressing tab on a line and the 
code line is indented to the correct level, saves a lot of time.

It can be pretty daunting to learn, firstly because it's based round 
LISP and second, it HUGE.  But once you've used it for a bit it's very 
powerful.

> I've had a look at it a couple of times but always found something
> that's easier to learn for the job I want it to do.

There are simply and more conventional editors out there (Nedit it great 
example), however, Emacs is not just an editor it's, to name a few, a 
mail reader, news reader, calendar and many more.


Thanks
Mark

> On 6/30/05, Chris Bond <chris at logics.co.uk> wrote:
>>http://freshmeat.net/projects/emacs/ 
>>
>>The name ``Emacs'' was originally chosen as an abbreviation of Editor
>>MACroS. 
>>
>>The original Emacs implementation was written for the Incompatible
>>Timesharing System (ITS) as a collection of TECO macros for ITS TECO. There
>>was a custom of giving such macro packages names ending in ``mac'' or
>>``macs''. A further reason for choosing this particular name was that the
>>abbreviation ``e'' was unused at the time on ITS. 
>> 
>>From: David Shorthouse [mailto:kungfu at globalnet.co.uk] 
>>Sent: 30 June 2005 4:24 PM
>>To: herefordshire at mailman.lug.org.uk;
>>herefordshire at mailman.lug.org.uk
>>Subject: [Herefordshire] Having a blonde moment!!!!
>>
>>Can anyone tell me what Emacs stands forI keeps coming up on the Linux
>>format but I Dont have any idea what it is????
>>
>>I hope all is well & see you all soon...
>>
>>Dave the Raver
>>