On Tue, Apr 09, 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Bottom-up vs. Top-Down learning [was Re: Meta-Post: Emacs/Vim/Perl/Python/other utils usage questions]": > That's because you favour the top-down method of learning how to use a > piece of software. Read the tutorial, read the API reference, etc. etc. > Then, if you remember everything you read, you can master it well.
No. This is why I gave you pointers to 3 documents: the tutorial is something you can read (while experimenting on the tutorial file itself, it's sort of interactive), it is very short, and in about an hour and you'll know all the basic XEmacs features. The next document was XEmacs's texinfo. That is longer (I think about 200 printed pages), but nothing forces you to read it at all, or read it at one sitting. When I learned XEmacs (about 7 years ago), I printed 20 pages of that document each day, and read the on the bus on my way home. You don't *have* to remember it all, and you don't even have to read it all if there are sections that don't interest you. The next document is a complete XEmacs Lisp reference. This is (if I remember correctly) about 600 pages, and not even I had enough patience to read it all ;) > I, however, like to use the bottom-up method: learn how to do that, learn > how to do that. When in the mood, read more or just browse looking for > useful stuff and learn more. If you are looking for something specific - Right - so what's wrong with my 20-pages-per-day approach? The most important issue is to have document with good quality (and in this case there is one) - then the way you use it is up to you - you can read the entire thing before you run "xemacs" for the first time, you can read a single page a day for a whole year, or you can search the index for concepts that seem interesting to you. > If Emacs can only be learned top-down, then I don't know if it is worth my > time for the while to learn it. I'd rather buy the O'Reilly book (which > covers GNU emacs and not XEmacs), because it would probably be better > than the built-in documentation. As I said, the XEmacs documentation is neither bad nor "top-down". Why don't you give it a try? Read the very short tutorial, and the first few pages of the texinfo file, and see what you think. > Besides, some distinguished members use > gvim for everything and only use emacs for specialized tasks. Some people > use joe or something similar (I know I used it exclusively very happily > for a time). This is what I do. I can't help it, I'm a vi junkie, and can type those vi commands in my sleep :) But (X)Emacs is more convenient for me for some tasks, such as long programming sessions (note that Vim has been catching up lately, with its syntax hilighting and other new features). > Emacs is just an example. Some people may have gvim questions (how do I do > that? I could not find it in the docs). Or Perl questions, or Python ones, > or grep or awk or sed or other UNIX meta-stuff. Maybe we should designate So, people are always asking here questions on specific Linux tools... You'll have to use your judment on whether a question is too simple to be asked here (RTFM instead!) or too specific to ask here (e.g., don't discuss here a specific bug in XEmacs - send it to some XEmacs mailing list instead). -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Apr 9 2002, 27 Nisan 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Sorry, but my karma just ran over your http://nadav.harel.org.il |dogma. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
