Re: Emacs

["David Z. Maze" <dmaze@donut.mit.edu>]

Sean  <snmjohnson@iclub.org> writes:
Sean> I've been thinking about giving emacs a look see, as it seems
Sean> that a zillion people out there use it, and I do like some of
Sean> the features I've heard about.  I went and took a very cursory
Sean> glance at the FAQ, and some of the online manual, and then went
Sean> to apt-get install.  This thing is HUGE.  I'd heard that emacs
Sean> wasn't small, but almost 10MB for a text editor? (+15MB if you
Sean> want to use xemacs)

(It's worth noting that the default 'emacs' packages *do* include X
support; XEmacs is a separate editor, which in many ways is almost
like GNU Emacs but has better support for graphics and proportional
fonts, and has many more add-on packages included.  If it's just you
on your system, you probably only need one or the other.)

Sean> Perhaps I'm just missing some glaring options, but for me to
Sean> download 10 or 25MB worth of text editor, this thing better do
Sean> everything except mop the floor.

A-yup.  :-)  I'm sending this mail from XEmacs; it includes at least
three or four different mail readers.  And a Web browser.  And a few
games (M-x blackbox, M-x xmine).  And a Zippy the Pinhead quotes
database (M-x yow).  And the traditional Eliza program (M-x doctor).
And of course M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead.  :-)

I program a decent bit and find Emacs tremendously useful.  I get
syntax highlighting and semi-automatic indententation.  I've bound
'C-c C-c' to run a M-x compile for me, and when that's done 'C-x `'
will highlight errors in the source.  There's also decent integration
between gdb and Emacs.

Sean> I'm not really up to starting a flame war, so comments like "use
Sean> emacs, it rocks, vi sucks!" are going to be utterly useless to
Sean> me.

(not flaming)  I don't use Emacs for *everything*.  Mail, news,
coding, TeX, it's wonderful, but from day-to-day text editing it is
kind of big and huge.  Yay vim.  :-)

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://donut.mit.edu/dmaze/
"Hey, Doug, do you mind if I push the Emergency Booth Self-Destruct Button?"
"Oh, sure, Dave, whatever...you _do_ know what that does, right?"