Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Complexity of computing w/ Emacs

[Chris Parsons]

On 06/07/2005 06:44, Allen Halsey wrote:
> But extrapolating from my progress these last 6 weeks, I feel I have a
> two years to go before I achieve effectiveness in computing in a Emacs +
> Planner + Gnus environment. And even that timeline I'm not so sure of.

I'm two years into rediscovering emacs, and I feel like I've still got
another two years to go :D

> Emacs can subsume the functionality of all these apps in a single
> instance. That's one button on task bar. But I hesitate to embark on
> this approach because I am absolutely terrified that I'll click that one
> button and drown in a sea of buffers.

Something you might find useful for this is iswitchb:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/IswitchBuffers

It improved my efficiency about five-fold when I discovered it. Now I
can have about 100 buffers open at once and not worry about it :)

There are plenty of little tricks for buffer management. For irc, for
example, there's a neat extension to ERC (the Emacs IRC client I use)
called erc-track; this shows all the active channels in your modeline.
There's lots of stuff like that - I discover a new trick every couple of
weeks :)

> I think maybe I just haven't learned the right tricks yet. Should I run
> each major app in separate frames? In separate instances? Is using an
> alernate Window Manager like RatPoison the answer?

I personally use just the one frame, but your mileage may vary.

I also just switched from gnus back to thunderbird as I'm now using imap
I saw a number of people having trouble with the imap support. Plus I
fancied a change... :)

Hope this is useful.

Chris