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Frequent improvements is a bad thing?
Authored by: jacius on Jan 20, '05 01:40:36AM

Just because there are hourly bugfixes doesn't mean you are compelled to update hourly. If the current version is fine, you might not upgrade ever. If there's a particular bug that's bothering you, you might update as soon as its fixed (instead of waiting several months for some company to release a new version). It's not like a popup is going to appear every hour and not let you work until you get the new version.

Re: Emacs in general:

I recently added an iBook to my formerly linux-only selection of computers (actually, I only have two, including the new one... oh well). In linux, I had been using vim exclusively, and at various times had played around with Emacs to see "what all the fuss was about." I never got into it, because a) it seemed quite bloated with things that I would never need; b) I didn't like Emacs' tab key functionality (automagically indent the current line, rather than insert a tab char); and c) it was hard on my pinky reaching for the Ctrl key for all those "crazy key combos".

Then I got a Paul Graham book about Lisp (_ANSI_Common_Lisp_) for Giftmas, so I thought I'd try Emacs on my iBook (Emacs and Lisp go together like something and something). The previous problems of bloat, indentation, and the Ctrl key came up again, but this time I got around them by a) shrugging and forgetting about bloat, as I have disk space to spare and not much on the Mac is particularly "lean" anyway; b) shrugging and not being obsessive about doing my own indentation, which I've come to realize is quite tedious; and c) remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl via uControl.

Problems solved. I ran through the tutorial for about the third time, and this time it stuck, and I got the hang of Emacs. It takes some time to get used to, and it's practically required to go through the myriad settings and customize it to your liking. I miss the powerful search/replace regex stuff of vim, but I'm sure it's possible to do similar stuff in Emacs, I just haven't discovered how yet.

All that said, Emacs is not for everyone. For example, remembering the common keys might be difficult for senile old ladies (no offense to senile old ladies intended). Although people who like to complain about new and different things will probably find lots of useful material for the first week or so of using Emacs. ;)



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Search and Replace / Auto indent
Authored by: jago_lebow on Jan 20, '05 01:44:13PM

M-% for search and replace in emacs. Its funny because the auto tabbing is probably the reason I haven't switched to an OSX text editor. most native mac osx apps have great multi lingual support (emacs has multilingual support, see my hint about it) and they just look nicer ;) . But the auto indent is such a time saver for me, it helps you to find missing parens or ;'s. And I'm sure if it is something that you don't want you can always get rid of it.

I also love the built in 'scp/ftp' no other apps needed.



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