OK, so somebody had to ask...

What is it, exactly, that makes Emacs so fantastic? What does it 
actually *do* beyond being a text editor?

(I mean, aside from the obvious fact that "Emacs" is actually just a 
Lisp interpretter that defaults to running a text editor application 
written in Lisp...)

Presumably there is a way of making Emacs read the content of a text 
file, use the various keys on the keyboard to edit that text, and save 
the result. But hey, Notepad can do that too! So what is it that Emacs 
does that's so awesom? What can it do that Notepad can't?

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Invisible wrote:
> OK, so somebody had to ask...
> 
> What is it, exactly, that makes Emacs so fantastic? What does it 
> actually *do* beyond being a text editor?
> 
> (I mean, aside from the obvious fact that "Emacs" is actually just a 
> Lisp interpretter that defaults to running a text editor application 
> written in Lisp...)
> 
> Presumably there is a way of making Emacs read the content of a text 
> file, use the various keys on the keyboard to edit that text, and save 
> the result. But hey, Notepad can do that too! So what is it that Emacs 
> does that's so awesom? What can it do that Notepad can't?

Customizable
Extensible/Programmable
Ported to many platforms
Internationalization
Runs in both text terminals and GUI environments
Many editing modes
Self documenting with built in tutorial
Detailed and well written manulas
Free and open source

AFAIK notepad is/has none of the above.

Try it for a while - and I bet you won't regret it.

-- 
Tor Olav
http://subcube.com

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My editor of choice is currently SciTE, so let's see how it compares 
against this checklist...

> Customizable

Check. (If only it didn't take so damned long to configure each time you 
install it...)

> Extensible/Programmable

Well, not so much. You can reprogram the syntax hilighting to handle 
some unknown language if it matches a known one closely enough. And you 
can program it to run external commands for you (e.g., compile my 
program, run this through LaTeX, open XDVI...)

> Ported to many platforms

SciTE runs on both Windows and Linux, and that's all I need.

> Internationalization

Not important to me.

> Runs in both text terminals and GUI environments

Could be useful...

> Many editing modes

...and?

> Self documenting with built in tutorial
> Detailed and well written manuals

Nice, but secondary. It's good to know a tool is easy to learn, but the 
question is whether it's *worth* learning in the first place.

> Free and open source

As is SciTE.

> AFAIK notepad is/has none of the above.

Agreed. Notepad fails in many, many basic ways. But SciTE is quite nice 
in general.

On the other hand, nobody rants on about how amazing SciTE is, but Emacs 
is considered the One True Editor. I'm just trying to figure out why - 
and if it's worth trying to use it.

> Try it for a while - and I bet you won't regret it.

Well, I don't know. IIRC, last time I tried to use it, I had to reboot 
the computer to exit it.

(Of course, had I known about virtual terminals back then, I could have 
just killed it from another vterm... Presumably on Windows it would be 
even simpler.)

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> My editor of choice is currently SciTE, so let's see how it compares 
> against this checklist...

Mine is TextPad, suits the job nicely for me, I especially like the tabbed 
browsing through documents similar to a lot of modern software.

http://www.textpad.com/products/textpad/features.html

> On the other hand, nobody rants on about how amazing SciTE is, but Emacs 
> is considered the One True Editor. I'm just trying to figure out why -

I've not heard this anywhere, every time I've heard emacs mentioned it is 
usually in a bad way.  Even my 2 friends at Universtiy who were totally into 
Linux stuff laughed when we were told to use emacs in one of our practical 
lessons, and proceeded to use something else (I forget what).

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> OK, so somebody had to ask...
>
> What is it, exactly, that makes Emacs so fantastic? What does it
> actually *do* beyond being a text editor?

I'm into vi myself, so I'll take your question to mean, "Why would you need
something other than Notepad anyway?"  Really?  I mean, really?  No, seriously?
 Are you referring to something like Notepad++ or just Notepad?  If you know a
good editor well, you can work about as fast as you can think.  Based on my
experience, I'd compare it to the difference between Dvorak typing and the
two-finger method.

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/index.html
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_toc.html

 - Ricky

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triple_r wrote:

> I'm into vi myself, so I'll take your question to mean, "Why would you need
> something other than Notepad anyway?"  Really?  I mean, really?  No, seriously?

Well, I actually use SciTE myself - but nobody has ever heard of that.

Yes, Notepad sucks. Massively. It fails at the most basic tasks. Then 
again, if all you need to do is quickly edit some INI file somewhere, 
Notepad can usually manage that, and it's always available. If you want 
to do anything more, get a real editor.

> If you know a good editor well, you can work about as fast as you can think.

I'm just curios to know what makes people think that Emacs (or Vi for 
that matter) is a good editor. I mean, SciTE has configurability, syntax 
hilighting and the ability to invoke external commands, but nobody 
thinks it's a good text editor. So what do Emacs and Vi have that SciTE 
doesn't?

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Invisible wrote:

> Yes, Notepad sucks. Massively. It fails at the most basic tasks. Then 
> again, if all you need to do is quickly edit some INI file somewhere, 
> Notepad can usually manage that, and it's always available. If you want 
> to do anything more, get a real editor.

I avoid Notepad like the black plague. I use Notepad2, which is also 
scintilla-based, free, and has basic syntax highlighting.

Strangely, I like the SDI interface it provides. It's lightweight, but 
at the same time much more powerful than notepad.

> 
> I'm just curios to know what makes people think that Emacs (or Vi for 
> that matter) is a good editor. I mean, SciTE has configurability, syntax 
> hilighting and the ability to invoke external commands, but nobody 
> thinks it's a good text editor. So what do Emacs and Vi have that SciTE 
> doesn't?

I tried Emacs under Windows once. I gave up on it. Vi is something I'd 
rather forget.

-- 
~Mike

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>> Yes, Notepad sucks. Massively. It fails at the most basic tasks. Then 
>> again, if all you need to do is quickly edit some INI file somewhere, 
>> Notepad can usually manage that, and it's always available. If you 
>> want to do anything more, get a real editor.
> 
> I avoid Notepad like the black plague.

Like I said, you can edit text with it, and every Windows PC has it 
installed. That's all it has going for it. If you want to do more than 
quickly edit one line of text, get a real editor.

> I use Notepad2, which is also 
> scintilla-based, free, and has basic syntax highlighting.

I use SciTE, which is also Scintilla-based and does syntax hilighting. 
(And XML tag completion, if you can remember how to enable it...)

Also, you can use it without having to "install" anything. Just 
download, unzip, and go. (Well... spend 3 days customising and *then* go.)

> I tried Emacs under Windows once. I gave up on it. Vi is something I'd 
> rather forget.

A glowing recommendation if ever I saw one...

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, I actually use SciTE myself - but nobody has ever heard of that.

Thanks for clarifying.  You're right that I've never heard of it, but my basic
answer would then be: If you think there's enough room for improvement in what
you currently use, or you're not sure what the hype is about, learn it.  Don't
just give it the old college try and give up though; give it a week or two and
see.  That sounds easy enough to say, so to be fair, I'm officially going
cold-turkey on vi.  The only vi command the guy I work for knows is ":q!", and
the only Emacs command I know is C-x C-c.  It makes for endless frustration.
It's Emacs or nothing from here on in.

 - Ricky

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Mike Raiford <"m[raiford]!at"@gmail.com> wrote:
> I tried Emacs under Windows once. I gave up on it. Vi is something I'd
> rather forget.

Don't worry.  I won't evangelize, but the word 'once' is clearly the problem, as
in, "I tried running once, but I didn't win, so I gave up."

 - Ricky

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