Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/05/15/12:44:26
On Mon, 12 May 1997, jon wrote:
> >What's so great about Emacs anyway?
>
> If you are willing to spend a few months or a year or so to really get
> in to it, it'll have the edge on DOS's EDIT. Spend some more time, and
> you can do everything from read newsgroups to clean up directories
> from emacs.
Actually, it doesn't take more than a few minutes to make Emacs supercede
EDIT. That is, if you care to begin by reading the tutorial that comes
with Emacs, instead of randomly pressing keys and clicking the mouse on
the menus which you don't understand.
> PC at home. I mean, why start up a freight-train when you can just
> walk next door?
One reason is that when you use Emacs, you invest in learning a single
editor that is available on every development platform you can imagine,
from DOS through Windows 3.x/95/NT and Unix to Cray. There is a limit to
how many powerful editors a person can learn well in a life time.
Another reason is that Emacs can be made to do anything. IMHO, no other
editor can compete with Emacs in this aspect, because Emacs has such a
huge base of people who write extensions for it. Let's say you will need
a special mode to edit VHDL files with your editor. With Emacs, you just
grep the directory where the packages are and you find one. With any
other editor, you are at the mercy of the maintainer(s).
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