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

[Emanuel Berg]

drain <aeuster@gmail.com> writes:

> The key is to tailor Emacs to the needs of the non-user. I was
> able to get a (female) art historian completely addicted to
> Emacs because I took her dissertation and broke it down into
> org-mode headlines. I sent her a video of this process -- how
> effortless it was -- and also explained how her thesis would
> have been much more coherently structured with regular headlines
> and subheadlines.
>
> Secondly, I showed her how effortlessly I could format
> paragraphs.

Isn't a thesis something LaTeX would be the natural choice for,
with its from-the-shelf support for a ToC, headers (of all sorts),
footnotes, references, etc.? Of which so much is automated to a
very high degree?

> Anyway, the point is, you can't just send someone a video of you
> editing a couple different .cpp buffers in multiple windows, or
> entering commands into the shell. You have to really convince
> someone -- in forms he / she understands -- that Emacs is an
> optimization machine for ALL forms of text editing.

Yes, I think videos are great for this! At least if the person who
makes the video has the real Emacs fingers, moving the cursor at
Jedi-master speed, killing, yanking, filling, other window,
reading mail, sending a Usenet post, evaluating some Elisp defun,
1-2-3, KO. Irresistible to any and all true techno-warriors.

I done well, I don't think there even need to be a speaker's voice
explaining what happens. Just the sound from the keyboard and some
techno-eurodisco-trance song to get the bloodlust going.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573