Re: Looking for a (Free? Cheap?) text editor

Subject: Re: Looking for a (Free? Cheap?) text editor
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2012 06:23:37 -0400

On Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:38:46 -0400, Richard L Hamilton <dick -at- rlhamilton -dot- net> wrote:

I know this dates me pretty severely, but there is very little you can't do with emacs.

Whenever I see one of those questions about, "How do I replace all this hairy text with that hairy text, and do it all these hairy places, except in the spots where the moon is retrograde?" I immediately think of emacs, and then usually do not recommend it to others. Emacs is built into my fingers, and has been for quite some time. Its major shortcoming is that Richard Stallman failed to predict, nigh 40 years ago, the keybindings that would be chosen by the developers of Unix shells and of MS-DOS.

I think that emacs provides the handiest way to write regexp and test it without harm. Its macro facility provides a means to avoid bothering with regexp in most circumstances, too. Emacs is Turing-complete. There truly is little you cannot do.

Still, you cannot adopt emacs casually for a one-time use. I'd liken it to intending to become Roman Catholic just to taste the Eucharist.

Fortunately my mind is sufficiently warped that I can shuffle between (DOS) C-C, C-X, C-V and (emacs) M-W, C-W, and C-Y with little cussing. Credo in unum emacsum. (That would be Gnu Emacs 23, right now.)

Emacs "org mode" (look it up) appears to be the leading edge of text-based development, avoiding all proprietary formats, and editable with ANY text editor.
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