On 8 July 2010 08:44,
<address@hidden> wrote:
I dont know of any organized effort.
I do try to attract people to Emacs and free software myself.
I think Emacs becomes very alluring when someone gets stuck on a laborious piece of text processing or searching. I've introduced a couple of people in work to it simply by virtue of regexp incremental search and keyboard macros. Now they're converts.
I mostly work with developers that use a windoze desktop, Eclipse, and
some secondary simpler editor. In recent years getting people interested
in Emacs has been difficult, I can only recall about one or two people I
helped getting started with Emacs the last 3 years.
It's hard to come up with persuasive arguments for emacs in the face of shiny new development environments. I suppose things like drag and drop refactoring and graphical editors (property lists, forms, tree based xml) are popular. Is this a by product of Eclipse being quite difficult and cumbersome when you try to search for something?
At home I use Emacs and JDE with Tags. In work I use Eclipse because it's the done thing. I often find myself copying large chunks of text into emacs to work with, then copying them back.
As I mentioned, Emacs earns its stripes when people discover the joys of automating away the drudgery and then explore the other things they can do. Whenever I mention emacs to anyone though, I'm met with either a blank stare or "Hah, Emacs. Nice operating system, shame about the editor.", "Emacs? Eight megs and constantly swapping!"
Just try it, friend. It's eight megs well spent.
--Stuart