David writes: > So we're left wondering why you've stated that learning emacs > necessarily involves learning lisp, either beforehand or at the same > time.
Probably because Emacs advocates often over-enthuse about extensibility, giving the erroneous impression that knowing how to write extensions is a necessary part of knowing how to use Emacs. In fact, much of what we now know as Emacs *is* extensions written in Elisp and many more extensions are available. You no more need to know Elisp to use them or to install additional ones than you need to know C to use Vim. There is also the fact that the configuration file is written in Elisp and one once had to know at least a tiny bit of Elisp to edit it. Now there is a configuration interface to handle that but the myth lingers on, along with the myth that one needs to memorize hundreds of esoteric escape sequences. -- John Hasler [email protected] Elmwood, WI USA
