[aklug] Emacs. Was: Re: Not that this resembles anyone I know.....

On 02/21/11 15:31, Jim wrote:
> Hi Chris
>
> I remember well about a thousand years ago (ok so it was really 1984)
> when i was first working on a Unix system. Several of my friends were
> singing the praises of emacs, and the vendors rep commented that you
> will always have vi on a system, emacs is problematical, and it has
> probably been hacked by the local guru. It has stood me well over the
> years when I went on to a client site and could do the work, without
> depending on a possibly non-existant toolkit.
>

That's a little bit like saying that Windows is the best operating
system to use because it is the most popular. (Pretty much a circular
argument, if you flesh it out.)

Anyway, this may surprise you, but I'm not actually a die-hard Emacs
fan. There are a few things I don't like about Emacs. Three things
especially:

(1) Loads slow. Normally this is fine, but in certain situations this
can be a problem, like when you are working remotely on a *nix system
that is overloaded with processes and short on memory.

(2) Lisp. Who /really/ wants to learn LISP just to program his text editor?

(3) Default settings. Some of the default Emacs settings can be rather
annoying, like dropping little backup files all over this place.

Having said that, I am a die-hard fan of Emacs keyboard command
combinations. Give me those meta and ctrl combinations, and I'll fly
around any text file.

I don't think Emacs should be installed by default on all distributions,
mainly because of how large it is as well as all the dependencies.
However, I /do/ think there should be a good emacs-like editor installed
by default on every Linux installation. And nano /so/ doesn't count.

I think I just inspired myself to go try all the different Emacs clones
again.

-- 
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