>   And to avoid giving the impression that I love emacs, I have to note that
> although I said that you *CAN* do those things with emacs, I didn't mention
> that it's *ANNOYINGLY DIFFICULT* to do so.

I think the worst problem is that it requires one to grasp Lisp, which
not many people with a DOS/Windows background do. So it's not just
about learning how to customize it, but also about learning a new
language, which is _very_ different from Pascal, C/C++, Basic etc.

Fortunately, a lot of other people have already written a ton of small
customizations to make Emacs behave more intelligent in particular
editing situations. That's what so nice about it - if I'm editing a
bulleted list like the following

  - this is the first point
    I want to make

  - and this is the second

Emacs will automatically break the lines for me and insert correct
indentations (I just told it to make short lines) instead of producing
garbage like this

  - this is the first point
I want to make

  - and this is the second

I know no other mail/news agents capable of doing that. All these
small niceties is what makes Emacs so invaluable - over 10 years of
polishing and fine tuning in one editor.

>   It took me no less than *TWO YEARS* to configure emacs to the extent that
> it is nowadays, where I like it.

But for you it must also have been a battle uphill. When I switched to
GNU/Linux and Emacs I simply threw out all the keybindings I had
memorized from my DOS/Windows days and started all over with the Emacs
tutorial. So within a few weeks I was more productive than I've ever
been with any DOS or Windows editor.

Cursor navigation with C-f, C-b etc. is extremely fast once you get
the hang of it. Your changes are quite radical in the way they effect
some basic assumptions in Emacs.

>   Emacs is far from user-friendly. However, it's incredibly powerful, which
> makes it a good editor for hardcore unix hackers... :)

One of the things I'm looking forward to in the upcoming v. 21 is a
more intuitive design with e.g. a toolbar. Personally I'm going to
turn it off immidiately, but it'll make it a lot easier for the rest
of my family who probably at one point are going to make the
transition to Linux, and will be needing an editor.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://sunsite.dk/olau/

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