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Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question
From: |
Rupert Swarbrick |
Subject: |
Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question |
Date: |
Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:47:57 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Pan/0.132 (Waxed in Black) |
On Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:04:46 -0800, signups17 wrote:
> Can anyone provide a cogent explanation for why I should take the time
> to climb that learning curve? What are the benefits, as you see them?
>
> Also, assuming I'm convinced, can you point me in the direction of a
> good tutorial?
>
> Thanks in advance.
Hi,
I'm not sure if there's an official FAQ for this group, but this sort of
question comes up *a lot*. My comments:
1) emacs is fun to use (this _really_ is the most important bit in my
opinion, and I've never encountered it in any other editor)
2) emacs is rather ludicrously customizable. You can write bits of elisp
code to change pretty much any part of its behaviour. Although usually
someone's done it in advance.
3) More generically, a powerful editor like emacs will allow you to avoid
retyping/copying/pasting so much, since its replacing functions, macros
and much more will allow you to rename the 70 variables you needed to add
a dollar to in 5 seconds, without developing RSI.
Now, the previous bit was my personal opinion. About tutorials,
presumably you mean an emacs tutorial (after all this is g.e.h), so:
1) Open up emacs and type C-h t (that is Ctrl-h followed by t) and read.
2) When you've finished reading that, there are numerous tutorials on the
internet - you could always start at www.emacswiki.org
Other general comments I might make:
1) "why I should take the time to"... isn't a great way to get slightly
hide-bound and clannish devotees of a text editor like me in a mood to be
helpful.
2) In general, specific questions are much more likely to get good
answers in a newsgroup. Looking quickly, I'd say that 9/10 of the first
page of hits in a google search for "emacs tutorial" returns something
useful. Maybe it would be worth trying that?
Rupert
- Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, signups17, 2008/01/17
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question,
Rupert Swarbrick <=
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, reader, 2008/01/17
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Nick Roberts, 2008/01/17
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Andreas Röhler, 2008/01/18
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Thien-Thi Nguyen, 2008/01/18
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Stefan Kamphausen, 2008/01/18
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Daniel Pittman, 2008/01/18
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Alan Mackenzie, 2008/01/18
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Mike Treseler, 2008/01/18
- Re: Beginning Hobbyist Programmer Question, Sebastian Tennant, 2008/01/22