On Friday, February 06, 2026 06:21:15 AM Eric S Fraga wrote: > org mode in Emacs would probably (definitely?) allow you to do > everything you have indicated. Emacs is available as a Debian package > out of the box.
Aside: I tried Emacs quite some time ago (ca. 2000 - 2002) and found it very difficult to get into and eventually abandoned it. I had come from the Windows world and was used to WYSIWG editors and word processors (e.g., Word). I'm willing to put at least a little time into reconsidering Emacs (should it be EMACS?) but would like to find a list where beginner's level questions might be asked (or, I guess I can search with DDG or ask an AI (I currently sometimes use chatgpt (cautiously))). Is there such a mail list? A quick sample of some of the questions I'd ask: * does (or can) EMACS use UTf-8 as its (or a) native <darn -- can't think of the right word> * can EMACS do what I think is known as soft or dynamic word wrap -- I mean word wrap without inserting line end characters to wrap the lines of a paragraph * is there somewhere a guide to LISP syntax that makes analogies to things like Algol or C (or Python, Pascal, or such). (Background: I originally learned Algol, then was forced to learn Fortran :-(, and then was exposed to and supposed to learn Lisp, but I never became comfortable with that. Something that would take (or display) some Lisp code snippets tanslated into something more like Pascal syntax would help me a lot, I think) * I currently edit files (in Kate) approaching 50 MB, I'd expect to do similar size (or more) files in Emacs, with lots of features enabled (e.g., TWiki or HTML (or other) syntax highlighting, folding (I guess that is org mode), etc. Should I be worried? * Oh, I also know that at one time Xemacs was created to be a gui for Emacs, my recollection is that, since then, Emacs has developed a gui interface -- ahh, yes, I'm 99% sure of that (so I shouldn't have listed / asked this here). Thanks!
