Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-ncis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!husc6!ogccse!blake!mcglk
From: mcglk@blake.acs.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Okay--I give; why is Emacs so great?
Summary: Why?  Why?  Convince me, please, someone.
Keywords: GNU Emacs
Message-ID: <490@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 5 Jan 89 20:30:37 GMT
Reply-To: mcglk@blake.acs.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Organization: Me?  Organized?
Lines: 76

Let's get something straight here.  First off, I have to applaud Richard
Stallman's effort to get GNU up and running.  (True, I have to wonder about
a man who wants to spread a brain-damage-inducing operating system
over the entire world for free, but I understand the drive, and respect
it.)

I was introduced to GNU Emacs some time ago.  Heck, I'm using it now.  But,
let's face it.  I haven't been impressed by what I've seen so far.

Perhaps it's because I haven't gone through the manual as completely as
I should have.  Perhaps it's because it's been *years* since I've played
with LISP.  Perhaps I've just gotten used to other editors.  But the
combination of GNU Emacs and Unix drives me just a little bonkers, not to
mention inducing an almost complete incomprehension of some of the starry-
eyed hackers (word meant in the olden and time-honored sense, thank you--
not the media mutation) who think Emacs is the greatest thing since the
standardized eight-bit byte and ASCII (which IBM still hasn't gotten its
mind around).

I like the idea of GNU Emacs--a fully programmable editor.  That's great--
I have no problem with the concept.  But the implementation is . . . well,
a bit tedious.

For example, when GNU Emacs first comes up, it not only has to load a
complete editor, but it also has to load a 100K LISP interpreter.  I suppose
I shouldn't make this a griping point, but something like this doesn't
exactly insure portability on anything smaller than a mini--particularly
with anything involving classic Intel segmented architecture ("Intel:
Flawed, And Built To Stay That Way").  Which means that, even though I
have source for the thing, it doesn't exactly port to anything I use
every day--only on non-segmented machines with a few meg of memory.

The next thing it has to do is read in--get this--the entire flipping file
into memory.  This, in many cases, has a tendency to limit its use to
machines with virtual memory.  Heck, most reasonable editors have the
ability to handle some way of only manipulating part of a large file, and
writing out the portions it's not using into a temporary file of some
sort.  I suppose this speeds up things, but it's so *sloppy* to assume
virtual memory or small files.  On occasion, it's a useful thing to
pull in a huge file, if only to break it up into smaller parts.  But in
Emacs, if you don't either (a) have the memory, or (b) have the virtual
memory, you're SOL.

LISP is nice.  But you hardly need LISP for a programmable editor.  The
designers could have come up with a somewhat abbreviated system to handle
most needs--one that could have fit into a third or so of the space.  Sure,
it's spiffy--but is it so useful that it's mandatory?  Or am I completely
missing the point?

And finally (at least for this missive):  sure, autosaving is handy.
Yup.  But infinitely better (at least, in my experience) is a journal
file.  Emacs has caught me off my guard more than once through something
like the following:  say I've been revising a 200K document, near the
end.  I revise the last paragraph, set my mark, and go to the end of
file and delete to mark.  Whoops; I went to the beginning of the file
instead.  Emacs gives an "autosaving..." message, and my network
connection with the Unix machine chooses to die before I can use the
Undo command.

With a journal file, I'd just come back and edit the journal file first--
removing everything after the last "set mark" command, then recover the
file using the journal file.  Instead, I'm stuck with going back to the
backup file, which erases all my changes.

I'm willing to try anything new.  And I have this annoying tendency to
listen to my friends.  Yet, so far, I have this involuntary gag reflex
that occurs when I use GNU Emacs.  Maybe there's something buried deep
within Emacs that will allow me to do everything I want, but at the
moment, I can't find it--and it the meantime, it's driving--me--slowly--
bananas.  (* b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b *)

Maybe some pointers?  Maybe some good arguments?  Heck, I'd love to
be convinced, even if I can't port it to a computer that I use every day.

				--Ken McGlothlen
				  mcglk@blake.acs.washington.edu