Date:	Mon, 10 Nov 1997 10:14:51 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	sl <SL AT usemail DOT com>
cc:	DJGPP mailing list <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>
Subject:	Re: Emacs
In-Reply-To:	<199711091927.OAA12252@delorie.com>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.971110101417.13667H-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Sun, 9 Nov 1997, sl wrote:

> 	I've tried EMACS and I still don't understand. What makes it
> so special?  What can it do which other programs can't? 

For how much time did you try it, and what optional features did you
use?  If you only looked at basic editing commands (scrolling, cursor
movement etc.), then all the editors are alike.

What makes Emacs special is the overwhelming amount of major,
intermediate and minor features which are waiting for you to be
discovered.  I work with Emacs for about 10 years now, and I'm still
amazed how almost every feature or option my everyday work calls for,
be it support for a new programming language, pretty-printing my
sources to a laser printer, or doing some symbolic math, is already
there.  And I have yet to see a program that has a help system where I
can actually find the info I need in less than a minute, as I do with
Emacs (and you might guess that I don't look for trivial info after so
many years of usage).

If you haven't read large parts of the on-line manual, and didn't look
at the comments of the *.el files in the lisp subdirectory, then you
might indeed have no idea about the wealth of Emacs features.

People would say that Emacs is infinitely-customizable (which is also
true), but I think it is more important, especially for the novice
user who doesn't have any Lisp experience, that there are a lot of
features which don't need *any* customization, just use them.

In addition, Emacs is available on all major platforms out there, so
your investment in learning it doesn't go down the drain when you need
to work on anything other than a PC.

> I find that RHIDE has more power than EMACS.

Can you please elaborate?  What did you miss in Emacs that you have in
RHIDE?

> It doesn't even have a built in debugger.. 

There *is* an integrated debugger: from the menu bar choose the
"Tools | Debugger" item.  Don't hold your breath, though: it doesn't
work on DOS because it needs multi-processing that DJGPP currently
doesn't support.  Maybe you can change that ;-).

- Raw text -