[Sussex] A beginner's guide to GNU/Linux

[Geoff Teale]

On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 19:10 +0000, Nic James Ferrier wrote:
> The GTK version is the least eccentric emacs so far.

Agreed.  Although there are some occasional oddities still. 

> All the people who I know who have learned emacs (including me but I
> don't know about Geoff) have learned it because they saw that it is an
> important tool. Not that it was a cool editor... but a unique and
> powerfull tool.

Interesting.  I'd fiddled with emacs experimentally since seeing some of
the Amiga based Emacs inspired editors - then a little at university
when we worked on LISP and Prolog (our lecturer suggested we use Nedit
to hack LISP - that got old *really* quickly).  However I didn't really
start to use it in any really major way until I started writing Ruby
code around about 5-6 years ago now (my, my how time flies).   It
started with the observation that emacs had ruby support and just about
nothing else did.  That coupled with the fact it ran everywhere I needed
it (Linux on my laptop and at home and NT4 at work at that time) gave me
reason to start doing day to day editing in emacs.

My realisation that emacs was more than an esoteric editor really came
when I started fixing issues in ruby-mode.el, and learning how to get
things working by customising my .emacs.   The final factor was coming
to Cmed - Emacs is our standard environment for python hacking, C
hacking, XML munging, etc. etc.  I've had the opportunity to invest time
in hacking ELISP to support our day to day operations - a blessing I am
very grateful for.

Now I've come to think of emacs not as an editor at all, but a LISP
environment with some damn good modules for writing editors. 


> What I'm getting at is that you have to _want_ to deal with the
> eccentricity. It's a bit like knowing, wanting to know, rms; or Billy
> Childish; or Jeffery Bernard.

Right - if you're looking for a notepad replacement Emacs is not for
you.  If you can't see an advantage in running emacs why would you do
it?

-- 
Geoff Teale
Software Engineering Team Leader

Cmed Group Ltd.
Holmwood
Broadlands Business Campus
Langhurstwood Road
Horsham RH12 4QP
United Kingdom


T +44 (0)1403 755071
F +44 (0)1403 755051
E gteale at cmedresearch.com
W www.cmedresearch.com
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