Pre-testing Emacs 22 [LWN.net]

Pre-testing Emacs 22

Posted Nov 2, 2006 19:15 UTC (Thu) by N0NB (guest, #3407)
Parent article: Pre-testing Emacs 22

I'm not a professional developer although I do a bit of coding from time to time. Mostly I am a hobbyist/home user and have excised both Emacs and vi and friends from my systems.

For quick editing of config files and such I use Midnight Commander. Yes, it's editor is clunky, but no worse than vi, plus it does feature syntax highlighting on recognized file types.

For any other work I use FTE which fits my approach to editing very well. These are among the first two apps that I install. No mode switching, no protheletizing, just results.

While Emacs 22 sounds impressive, I already run KDE, so I don't need another DE. Secondly, I want an editor that edits without having to remember modes, allows the use of the mouse or keyboard to select text, and supports the basic Wordstar keystrokes for movement and text operations. I get that with FTE.

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Pre-testing Emacs 22

Posted Nov 3, 2006 0:50 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

You also get all the things you asked about with Emacs (with, I think,
brief-mode).

You don't have to `remember' modes: for the most part they fly into
existence when you need them (make-mode when you load a makefile, cc-mode
when you load C code, info-mode when you read info, various gnus modes
when you're reading news).

And, um, I can't imagine what made you think that KDE and Emacs are in any
way incompatible. Emacs is an *editor*: you can use it as an editor and
use the desktop's features for e.g. terminal emulators, or live in it and
hardly ever venture out, it's up to you. (I do both: at work I live
entirely in XEmacs and hardly ever look at anything else: at home I use
konsoles and graphical media viewers and RSS aggregators and the like.)

Pre-testing Emacs 22

Posted Nov 3, 2006 4:31 UTC (Fri) by N0NB (guest, #3407) [Link] (1 responses)

My point wasn't that KDE and Emacs are incompatible. I was making an obscure point in reference to the article's mention that Version 22 includes *two* IRC clients along with a spreadsheet to go with the existing mail and news and other functions. Thus my point about already having one DE that I use and not needing another.

Sheesh! Some of you guys take all of the fun out of posting...

But, I march to the beat of my own drummer. Which is why I switched to Linux full time long before there were any thoughts of IPOs or companies releasing some proprietary program as "open source". I won't be joining the vi or Emacs camps anytime soon (yes, I've tried each in the past, I just wish I could avoid vi as successfully as I can avoid Emacs) as I have found what works best for me.

The great thing about Free Software is that one need not live in a straight jacket.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

Posted Nov 14, 2006 20:56 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aha.

(And if you want to live in a straitjacket, Emacs has a psychiatrist. It's
stuffed with dead useful features like that. A minesweeper game, too, and
a window manager. Just what you want in your text editor: if it crashes X
goes down with it!)

Pre-testing Emacs 22

Posted Nov 3, 2006 2:52 UTC (Fri) by cyd (guest, #4153) [Link]

In Emacs, you can do M-x wordstar-mode RET. This turns on wordstar-like key bindings.