Learning Emacs.

posted in life by jon on 2006-03-18

After much hand-wringing and hem-hawing, I’ve decided to really, really learn emacs. There’s just something abouts emacs users (and lisp hackers too for that matter) that makes you feel like you’re missing something for not drinking their kool-aid.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard >Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, >and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other >words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and >the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, >focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a >professional writer–i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and >printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does >the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. - Neal Stephenson

They all used Emacs, of course. Hell, Eric Benson was one of the authors of XEmacs. All of the greatest >engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. Not the great gal in the cube next to you. Not >Fred, the amazing guy down the hall. I’m talking about the greatest software developers of our profession, the >ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings, the Donald Knuths, the Paul Grahams1, the >Jamie Zawinskis, the Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it >makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it. Go look over Paul Nordstrom’s shoulder while he works >sometime, if you don’t believe me. It’s a real eye-opener for someone who’s used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs >their whole career. Emacs is the 100-year editor. - Steve Yegge

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