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I have long had a (very) idle dream about learning enough eLisp to convert Emacs, which I gather is quite phenomenally powerful and all that -- Neal Stephenson says so and he is as a god to me -- into an actual usable modern editor. I.e. something that looks and works like Notepad or Gedit or MS-DOS Editor: a basic CUA interface, because those are the keybindings I have been using since the end of the 1980s and they are now indelibly burned into my muscle memory.
But someone has gone and done it already.
http://ergoemacs.org/
I've been experimenting a little. It's Emacs, but it actually works with the same keystrokes as every other editor for the last 20+ years. It's amazing.
And unlike the lovely Aquamacs, it doesn't need Mac OS X.
I am not sure I have the flexibility to adapt any more, but I am liking what I am seeing. There's a monster lurking behind this friendly face, but it gets me over the initial hump that none of the editing keystrokes I use daily on Windows, Macs and Linux alike work any more on Emacs.
Aside: don't suggest Vi. I can use it for the very basics, but then again I could probably type with my nose if I had to. I choose not to because it's slow and unpleasant. It is not even as modern as MS-DOS Edit - it's a vestige from the 1970s. I remember using text editors on VAX/VMS nearly 30 years ago and having to flip from edit mode to command mode and back all the time. It was crap then and it's intolerable now; I don't care how many other features it has, the basic operating mode is a POS.
But someone has gone and done it already.
http://ergoemacs.org/
I've been experimenting a little. It's Emacs, but it actually works with the same keystrokes as every other editor for the last 20+ years. It's amazing.
And unlike the lovely Aquamacs, it doesn't need Mac OS X.
I am not sure I have the flexibility to adapt any more, but I am liking what I am seeing. There's a monster lurking behind this friendly face, but it gets me over the initial hump that none of the editing keystrokes I use daily on Windows, Macs and Linux alike work any more on Emacs.
Aside: don't suggest Vi. I can use it for the very basics, but then again I could probably type with my nose if I had to. I choose not to because it's slow and unpleasant. It is not even as modern as MS-DOS Edit - it's a vestige from the 1970s. I remember using text editors on VAX/VMS nearly 30 years ago and having to flip from edit mode to command mode and back all the time. It was crap then and it's intolerable now; I don't care how many other features it has, the basic operating mode is a POS.
