hello all, because i started the discussion i am feeling constrained to say some words to the discussion with the background of an emacs beginner. first of all my motivation. the last years i worked with ultraedit and was quite content. then i changed my job and ultraedit wasn't available any more. i didn't want to write a requst for buying software and so i searched with google for an advanced open source editor which was capable of editing columns. i wasn't the first with that problem and nearly all answers i found in different discussion groups pointed to emacs. as an old friend of open source software i knew emacs and his history but i didn't dare until yet to use it becaues all people i know said its so complicated and time consuming to learn it. next i went to the emacs homepage and downloaded the win32-binaries and installed it. Looking for help i was a little bit confused about the many links and headlines below the point Getting Help with GNU Emacs. next i looked at the help menu. Glad to see the point tutorial i started to work through and after a few hours i was ready to start. but now i was faced with typical editing problems. for example i wanted to move a paragraph from one point in the document to the other. in ultraedit (or notepad or proton or ...) a quite simple task: (text marking with the mouse C-x C-v). in emacs at the first look a little bit more complicated or at least unfamiliar to me. i didn't found such an example in the emacs manual and it took quite a time to find one with google. next i wanted to delete all empty lines, search and replace strings and so on, typical edit tasks at least i bought the book learning ggnu emacs and after a while i read somewhere maybe in the book maybe in the internet that its better to open every file in the same frame. so i came to emacsW32. because i had a problem with the installation (my fault, look some emails before) i thought a way to solve it would be to edit the .emacs-file. again i looked in the manual but i didn't find something. i was still a beginner and i didn't know at all that the .emacs-file and elisp has the same basics. but i stayed stiff-necked and after a lot fo attempts i found a solution which worked but i wasn't really content. so i wrote to the list and lennard helped me out. but i wanted a list of all possible customization commands. the solution came from drew adams (M-x customize-apropos-options RET . RET). that was i looked for. and after the mails of eli i took a second closer look to the manual and now i am quite sure that nearly everything about emacs i can find there and i am sure with more experience i will use the manual more extensively. eli is also right that many internetsites are outdated and pointing in the wrong direction. BUT if you are a emacs-newbie, at least for me, the manual is very confusing maybe because its so powerfull, like emacs itself. at the first time all i had needed would be a simple document with normal tasks:
1) installation and configuration (for me especially with windows) 2) simple emacs-commandos like described in the tutorial in the emacs help menu 3) more extensivly examples for typical editing tasks like search and replace, copy and paste, rectangle editing, ...and so on. only with examples newbies can see the possibilities of emacs 4) a few word about the .emacs file and customization 5) a glossary with the special emacs terms 6) and all that in a separat pdf-document again, i am sure everything i wrote above is integrated in the manual but a newbie has great problems to find it and i am sure many potential users give up after a few hours. the best would be this pdf-file could be downloaded with the emacs-file an a bundle or at least at the same site. all i wrote above is my personal experience and opinion. but i wanted to write it to you all because you are investing so much time for such a great project like emacs and the only i can do now is to give you some feedback for your work with the background of a beginner. i have installed emacs since two weeks, i have invested a lot of time, much more time than i have ever invested for example to learn ultraedit, but i am confident that its an investment for the future and for me its also a lot of fun to to discover the possibilities of emacs. but i think it would easier to climb on the first emacs-hill with a short introduction-document than with the emacs bible what the manual in fact is. thanks to all again for your help and greetings from munich christian p.s. maybe i write for myself such a document if a know more about emacs -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von Eli Zaretskii Gesendet: Freitag, 7. Juli 2006 11:10 An: Lennart Borgman Cc: [email protected] Betreff: Re: [h-e-w] EmacsW32, gnuserv, pathes in .emacs > Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 23:40:12 +0200 > From: Lennart Borgman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > CC: [email protected] > > > What, you mean your advice to use Explorer? I just saved you from > > RMS's wrath, that's all ;-) > > > > > Firefox please ;-) Wed all know what most Windows users have on their boxes as the default browser.
