[olug] emacs book

[Mark A. Martin]

I think that it's important to be well-versed in at least one
full-featured editor that you can use without the benefit of X Windows. 
That way you aren't completely incapacitated if you have to run in
single-user mode or if your X server won't start or if you have to boot
from a floppy to repair a problem or ...  Emacs is huge and probably has
too many features but it is also very powerful, interfaces well with
other GNU tools such as gdb, has helpful modes for handling different
types of files, and the virtual terms come in handy if you're stuck in
one of the situations that I mentioned earlier.  I am also a fan of vi
(or vim).  It is lightweight, full-featured, and you can find it on any
UNIX system.  I have a good knowledge of both emacs and vi and use them
both very frequently, depending on the task at hand or how I'm feeling
on a given day.

I don't think that pico is a very good option since it lacks a lot of
features.  For example, what if you have to delete the last 199,840
lines of a 200,000 line file (and you're not allowed to use head)?  This
task would take less than 10 seconds in vi or emacs but could take you
hours in pico.  I can't say anything about nano because I've never seen
it.  Maybe it's too small for me to see. ;-)  But even if nano is
full-featured, it isn't as widespread as vi and you may not have access
to it if you're working on somebody else's system or on a new system at
work or working from a rescue disk or working from one of the small
Linux distributions or ...

The point is that everyone needs to be adept with an editor and everyone
who works with a UNIX system will sooner or later need some of the more
advanced features of an editor such as vi/vim or emacs.  Also, some
people need a more systematic approach to learning than they can get by
just playing around with commands from a reference.  For those people, I
suggest getting either the O'Reilly vi book, "Learning GNU Emacs", or
the emacs book that Dave recommended and reading through their chosen
book with the computer in front of them for trying things out.

I've said way too much on this list over the past couple of weeks and
have probably made more than my share of enemies.  I'd like to just shut
up now and hopefully I'll be able to keep my big mouth shut.

Best of luck,

Mark
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Mark A. Martin					Dept of Applied Mathematics
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~mmartin	University of Washington
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