Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?"

[Emanuel Berg]

Luca Ferrari <fluca1978@infinito.it> writes:

> I started using Emacs because (i) I hated vi with a passion,
> since it was the _only_ editor university was teaching us and I
> was wondering why and (ii) because I found it incredibly faster
> than more other editors. For instance, while doing my master
> degree thesis, a latex document that resulted in almost 300
> pages ...

Yes. Some people say Emacs cannot be used instead of the
Open/LibreOffice word processors, because you want documents that
are pleasant to the human eye, not just stuff that are to be
parsed by computers. This is not true: if you use LaTeX in Emacs,
not only do you have all the pros of the *editor*, you have so
much more precision (math formulas, etc.) and "beauty" (ToC,
references, etc.) as for the final result.

The same can be said of HTML/CSS (in Emacs, as compared to
"WYSIWYG"-editors), although I wouldn't put HTML/CSS on the same
level as LaTeX anytime soon.

> I teach some web stuff in high school, and I'd love students use
> emacs but I have to face that students are not living a point
> and click generation and they do not understand the real power
> of using keystrokes.

Yes. Did you read the very long GEH discussion on the mouse
vs. the keyboard? It all started in a thread on how to reduce the
Emacs boot time.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573