Unix Programming - My interests are converging onto emacs

Author

My interests are converging onto emacs - my emacs 'office', no, OS!

casioculture@gmail.com

2005-11-09, 3:57 am

I had thought that I'd be a VIM guy because it's the posix standard
editor, but I got interested in lisp, and what do you know, I got
recommended SLIME (The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs), and
then I'm also relearning a lot of statistics and got using R and that
led me to be recommended ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) for R, and then
I'm also interested in LaTeX and ConTeXt and that led me to AUCTeX, and
I'm also getting again into chess and that found me Emacs Chess.

At some point in the future - no rush - I plan to learn sqlite and if
need be a simple scripting language for it such as its TCL default or
even perl, python or ruby (though sqlite can already be used from R and
perhaps lisp - and as for the other scripting languages I had just
learnt bash, grep, sed, awk - yes, I know too I can use shell from
emacs :-) - and regular expressions already anyway so perl, which is
an awk on steroids, is a natural and almost inevitable progression
thanks to my lust for its CPAN, and knowing both Perl and Lisp had been
recommended and are medium to long-term targets for me, and python is a
lisp-made-easy and Ruby either a lispish-perl-made-easy or a
perlish-lisp-made-easy that's talking small and squeaking, and I'm
almost sure emacs would work well with these. I have tried to learn
perl, python, and ruby in the past and I know for sure that what I
found difficult or didn't understand of them back then is well covered
by posix and regexes that I've learnt already and the abstractness of
lisp programming that I'm learning now, but I'm digressing here - in
fact, I dont' even have to learn any of those if I don't want to;
laTeX, R, awk leading to perl, and lisp are far more than good enough
for my needs).

For each (SLIME, ESS, AUCTex, Emacs Chess) the features of the emacs
'thingie' are impressive - for example, even for Emacs Chess, which
ought to be the least impressive being an almost passtime thingie, its
flexible features and convenience are still pretty impressive compared
to any other chess package I found.

I see why some people call emacs an OS. I love it already even though
I'm yet to learn it well to benefit from its immense power. I'm
learning all of the above things I mentioned for personal interest and
assistive to professional skills (programming as abstract thinking and
hence lisp, statistics and R are about to become almost indispensable
for me, dialectic and academic writing and hence tex, and chess as a
pastime mental exercise in problem-solving and metaphor for wider
thinking, it's also fun) and I guess for this I'll be spending much of
my time in emacs - whether it's personal pastime or part of
professional tasks - for the foreseeble future as all of the above is a
considerable but very worthwhile amount to learn and a powerful thing
to then use.

I used to think I knew more MS Office than most people, and knew
openoffice quite well too, but my emerging emacs 'office' is proving
all I had used and known before to be pretty pathetic (LaTeX/ConTeXt vs
Word, no contest! R language (+/-sqlite) statistics versus excel, no
contest! sqlite + either one of tcl/R/python/ruby/perl/lisp versus
acces, no contest!). I'll also have the powers of CTAN, CRAN and CPAN
if I need to, and the powers of emacs, the self-editing editor, and
lisp, the "programmable programming language".

In fact, I won't even need KDE or Gnome for the above. Just a fast
simple stable minimalist linux/bsd with my needed interpreters and X
with perhaps a minimalist window manager and then emacs, and I could
use that on any computer even the most basic laptop and I'm sure it
would run pretty well - I'm almost sure could even have it 'live' on a
usb thumb or small cd.

I have been using MS software and the click-and-point culture for
almost two decades, what a waste that had been! How shortsighted it is
to stick with something so limited. Perhaps in the past I had an excuse
to be lousy but now I don't, there's the internet, google, tons of
tutorials and docs and even videos (SICP), and mature free OS and OSS,
and with a little time this stuff isn't too difficult to learn for
individual basic use.

How could I not love emacs and my above setup (for now learning
objectives though progressing quite well so far and much faster than
planned) and be excited about it. How could I not love OSS and GNU. My
computing needs are covered for the coming decade and perhaps more
pretty well and my private pastime aside from social activities looks
interesting and perhaps fun with the side-effect of being quite useful
and very enabling too.

This post started with what I thought would be two to four lines, but
has ballooned, which is OK, as this sums up my thoughts and plans for a
considerable period of time to come, and also expresses my excitement
about it.

Mabden

2005-11-14, 7:57 am

<casioculture@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1131526419.794358.50080@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> I had [a] thought

I don't care. Please don't tell me about your thoughts. You are not
interesting. Sorry.

--
Mabden
p.s. By "sorry" I meant YOU are sorry, it was not an apology.

cornstalk

2005-11-28, 9:42 am

It appears that we share some interests, especially enthusiasm for emacs: I am an economist and statistician, and I use ess with emacs here at my work (though I use SAS, not R); I'm a USCF-rated Chess Master, though I don't use emacs-chess, which appears to me to be merely a tool to play chess on the internet; I use a minimalist, emacs-like window manger, Ion. I have a config file by means of which Ion is controlled by emacs-like keystrokes. If it turns out you're interested in Ion, I would be happy to share the config file.

I have not yet dabbled in emacs lisp for anything serious, though I have the book on it, and the one on writing emacs extenstions, and have given some time to reading these. I have some ideas about extending emacs-chess and making it more of a chess spreadsheet/chess database application.

Something I don't think you mention in your post is emacs-w3m. w3m is a good browser, and with emacs-w3m, it runs within emacs.

Much of my interest in emacs (and Ion) is that I really do not care for mouse interractions. Clumsy and slow. I prefer to interract strictly through the keyboard. The versatility and adaptability of emacs is excellent for that, since essentially the same set of keystroke commands are good for everything.

Well, nice talking to you.

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