Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 10:14:51 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii To: sl cc: DJGPP mailing list Subject: Re: Emacs In-Reply-To: <199711091927.OAA12252@delorie.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On Sun, 9 Nov 1997, sl wrote: > I've tried EMACS and I still don't understand. What makes it > so special? What can it do which other programs can't? For how much time did you try it, and what optional features did you use? If you only looked at basic editing commands (scrolling, cursor movement etc.), then all the editors are alike. What makes Emacs special is the overwhelming amount of major, intermediate and minor features which are waiting for you to be discovered. I work with Emacs for about 10 years now, and I'm still amazed how almost every feature or option my everyday work calls for, be it support for a new programming language, pretty-printing my sources to a laser printer, or doing some symbolic math, is already there. And I have yet to see a program that has a help system where I can actually find the info I need in less than a minute, as I do with Emacs (and you might guess that I don't look for trivial info after so many years of usage). If you haven't read large parts of the on-line manual, and didn't look at the comments of the *.el files in the lisp subdirectory, then you might indeed have no idea about the wealth of Emacs features. People would say that Emacs is infinitely-customizable (which is also true), but I think it is more important, especially for the novice user who doesn't have any Lisp experience, that there are a lot of features which don't need *any* customization, just use them. In addition, Emacs is available on all major platforms out there, so your investment in learning it doesn't go down the drain when you need to work on anything other than a PC. > I find that RHIDE has more power than EMACS. Can you please elaborate? What did you miss in Emacs that you have in RHIDE? > It doesn't even have a built in debugger.. There *is* an integrated debugger: from the menu bar choose the "Tools | Debugger" item. Don't hold your breath, though: it doesn't work on DOS because it needs multi-processing that DJGPP currently doesn't support. Maybe you can change that ;-).