Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?"

[Aurélien DESBRIÈRES]

Luca Ferrari <fluca1978@infinito.it> writes:

> On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 5:37 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Monday, July 29, 2013 8:16:05 PM UTC+5:30, Jambunathan K wrote:
>>> Personally, my first love with Emacs was when someone showed M-q to me
>>> and the most uglily indented text aligned nicely between the margins.
>>
>> I started using emacs in the early 90s because I wanted something
>> better than an interactive shell for teaching interaction with a
>> (pre)haskell interpreter.  Dunno if comint mode existed then -- I at
>> least did not know about it.
>> Wrote my own mode which used to crash not just emacs but even linux
>> in interesting ways! Couple of years later, found scheme-mode
>> written on top of comint and search-n-replaced it for my purposes.
>>
>
> I started using Emacs because (i) I hated vi with a passion, since it
> was the _only_ editor university was teaching us and I was wondering
> why and (ii) because I found it incredibly faster than more other
> editors. For instance, while doing my master degree thesis, a latex
> document that resulted in almost 300 pages, emacs was able to le tme
> search forward and backward incrementally, while other editors, even
> those latex-branded, were sinking parsing such a large document.
> Therefore I decided Emacs had to be my editor of choice, and then I
> used to program almost everything I had in almost every language
> ranging from java, perl, php, etc.
>
> I teach some web stuff in high school, and I'd love students use emacs
> but I have to face that students are not living a point and click
> generation and they do not understand the real power of using
> keystrokes. Moreover, as already said, they are brain damaged and this
> does not help. To learn Emacs (as to learn anything else) you need
> attitude.
>
>
>
>
>> I am frequently asked to use something more 'modern/reasonable' etc than 
>> emacs (eclipse/sublime-text etc).
>>
>
> This is something happens to me too: my colleagues often look at me
> like a nerd because I don't use something more eye-candy like
> ultraedit/eclipse/netbeans/whatever. But I feel comfortable with my
> keys and the speed of emacs.
>
> There are however a few places where Emacs should get a real improvement:
> - IDE-like support and code autocompletion (cedet and autocomplete are
> very helpful, but there is still a gap with some major IDEs)
> - prebuilt and preconfigured packages: often configuring emacs is a quite 
> tricky
> - inclusion in base systems: the first thing I often do when
> installing a new system is to add emacs since it is rarely used as a
> default editor.
>
> Luca
>
>


GNU Emacs is an Extensible Editor.

Extensible (word) have it's importance in the way that the limit with
GNU Emacs is you.

GNU Emacs is not difficult to learn and by the way it will teach you
Computer Sciences.

C-h i have been be and is at this time my best teacher!

Thanks Richard and all maintainer for that great tool.

P.S. : try GNU Emacs out of X you will discover and OS in the OS ;-)


-- 
Aurélien DESBRIÈRES
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