Emacs vs. the World

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3B4CD02D.D6E3E53C@easystreet.com>, Al Christians says...
>font.  Emacs, wasn't.  So, I just tried it, first time for me,  
>in Delphi and MSVC++.  I find it in 3 mouse clicks (0 keystrokes) 
>through the pulldowns on each of those programs.  I don't have to 

Exactly how did you do that with MSVC++? Seriously. As I said before, the only
way I found to do it in there (version 6.0) requres no less than..let's check
again...1 click-drag-release, followed by 8 mouse clicks. This to get to the
same place I get in Emacs with one simultanious keypress-click.

>It's OK to appeal to the minority who don't like point and click 

It would be nice if we even *had* the problem where it was just a matter of
perspective. For the most part what we have is a bunch of editors that flat out
can't do all the things Emacs can do. I'm not allergic to the mouse specificly.
But I *do* need functionality. I need stuff like saved multi-buffer macros,
rectangular cut-and-paste, source code reformatting at the press of a key or
two, auto-capitalization (even when acronyns are involved), command shells with
infinite history (some would say that I also need "doctor" :-)  ). This stuff
isn't fluff, it saves me tons of time and headaches. IDE's with an editor that
can't do all this (and much more that I didn't mention) may be really nice, but
I can't use them. It would be knowingly wasting my own time.

I'm not trying to sit here and say that its impossible to make an editor better
than Emacs. But Emacs has been under constant development and scrutiny by
hundreds of developers for over 16 years now. You certianly aren't going to whip
up something better in a month, or even a year. Even with a full-time team you
probably couldn't begin to get close to its funtionality and extensibility in 2
years of work, and in that time the Emacs community won't have been standing
still either. So why even try? Just integrate it into your environment. If you
have a good reason to believe that there's something wrong with its
presentation, fix it! It may not be easy, but it'll certianly be easier than
reproducing everything good that Emacs has.

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