On Oct 26, 11:01 pm, Justin Israel <[email protected]> wrote: > Emacs is your favorite OS?
It's an old joke that probably came from the vi community: "Emacs is a great operating system. Too bad it doesn't have a decent text editor." But there's some truth to it. Emacs was a pretty huge executable back in the day- another old joke is that Emacs stands for "Eleven Megs and constantly swapping," though that joke doesn't make much sense anymore. But Emacs is also very programmable and really hardcore Emacs users use it to do almost everything. It has a web browser, an email client, an irc client, a newsreader, modes for interacting with various source control systems, Tetris, a few chatbots, including Eliza and Zippy the Pinhead (who you can make converse with each other if it's a really slow day at the office,) etc. As Xavier Ho points out you can open a system shell in an Emacs buffer. And Emacs is very programmable, if you don't mind the idiosyncracies of Emacs Lisp. I wind up developing on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there was a time when I used a couple of other operating systems pretty regularly. Treating Emacs like an OS as much as I can helps to soften the blow of moving from platform to platform, though I'm definitely not a really hardcore Emacs user. Among other things, I'm not able to grow a luxurious enough beard to qualify ;). I do think that Emacs is a decent text editor, but I sometimes suspect that vi might be a better one. And I'm pretty sure vi is less likely to give you an RSI than Emacs is. Emacs does have an answer to this though- there is a mode for emacs (more than one actually, I think,) that makes Emacs's text editing a lot like vi's. But it's a little like switching to a programmer's Dvorak keyboard layout- something I sometimes think I ought to do, but which I am too set in my ways to actually do. Best T -- view archives: http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya change your subscription settings: http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya/subscribe
