The SoapVox

I found a very interesting blog post in /etc/init.d/lifed restart (what a cool and geeky name for a blog, uh? :) about the be-all text editing monster, emacs.

I’ve been an emacs user for years now…around 12 or so, I think. I started using it because in the Sun box I was working on at the time, it was either use emacs or use vi…and vi didn’t make sense to me back then…and still makes no sense to me now lol! Having a command mode and an edit mode is something I can’t wrap my head around…I mean…it’s a text editor, right? Then why the hell do I need to tell it that I want to actually, you know, edit? I can’t wrap my head around the design logic of that.

On the other hand, in emacs, for a newbie, you open the file, edit it and save it. Yes, I had to ask how the hell to save the file and exit (ctrl-x ctl-s to save and ctrl-x ctrl-c to exit), but at least I was able to actually edit the file right away, by using the same keys I’ve always used to move around, delete and so on. And for a long time, that’s the way I used emacs…open a file, edit the file, save and exit. Think of it as notepad-on-*NIX if you want.

Then, about 6 years ago or so, I met a guy who was an emacs manic. He’d do all kinds of things with it, from reading his email to writing code…hell, he had it as his shell for a long time! He started telling me about all the marvelous things that you can do with emacs, and he started teaching me tricks and passing code to me for my dotemacs file (which now is half a megabyte, not counting my 300kb dotgnus file nor any of the auxiliary config files I load when an emacs session starts) so I could make my emacsing more and more productive. A few months later, I moved my email from pronto! to gnus and was doing most of my system administration within it (tramp rules the world, nothing like using your own fully configured editor to edit remote files) as well as everything else that required editing of text. Thanks to him, I discovered the tons and tons of text editing modes that make life easier, color coding and syntax highlighting became saviors when I had to modify large apache config files, or create complete samba files for clients and a million and one other different things.

In short, emacs became my main interface for a whole lot of things, tho I never went as far into it as Rafa is. I’ve never IRCed with emacs, I never used the shell as my main shell (tho I’ve used it in combination with tramp a few times) and I’ve never ever used it as my “windowmanager” (yes, he did it, for a while). And after 12 years, two of my 8 virtual desktops are still dedicated to emacs. I have one emacs session running with gnus in it open all the time, checking my mail and USENET news, and another session in a second vdesk for all my editing. I use other programs for web (firefox), rss (blogbridge), IRC (xchat), but for manipulating text, emacs rules the world.

I recommend the post I linked to at the beginning of this, it’s an interest overview of emacs, a very good introduction to the creation of RMS, that will make it easy for those that don’t know it to see why we members of the Church of Emacs are so, and for those that know it but don’t get it, it should be a good chance to probably get it.

Technorati Tags: emacs, gnu emacs, text editing, gnus, tramp

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