Re: emacs for everything?

[respower]

On 2004-11-15, Mike <mikee@mikee.ath.cx> wrote:
> I know there are threads about creating an os with forth, lisp, perl,
> etc., what about emacs? Not creating the os, but rather doing everything
> from within emacs: mail, news, shells, browsing, etc. I know these
> things all work, but what about using emacs as a 'way of life' sort
> of thing?

For me this is a Turing-machine kind of question:  I _could_ use emacs
for pretty much everything, but there are imo much better ways to do
almost everything other than text-editing.  Obviously the details would
be different for each person, but for me, mutt and Mail.app (in osx) are
better mail clients than vm, slrn is a better news client than gnus,
OmniWeb and Firefox are much better browswers than anything that runs
in emacs, rxvt and Terminal.app are better terminal emulators than
eterm etc etc. 

On a side-note, I've recently been trying to force myself to reconsider
emacs even as a text-editor:  after 20+ years of emacs I decided it was
time to learn vi(m).  In fact I'm using vim right now to compose this
post.  But the more I use it, and the better I get at using it, the more
obvious it becomes that my productivity will always be far higher with
emacs.  That's essentially the same reason I don't use emacs for other
kinds of tasks (mail etc) -- I'm far more productive with other tools.