
Why Emacs is still so useful today - rayvega
http://xahlee.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-emacs-is-still-so-useful-today.html
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jrockway
Xah's article on how to pick prostitutes is much better.

[http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/las_vegas/20031015_cop...](http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/las_vegas/20031015_copulate.html)

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mahmud
That's both funny and an evil character assassination. If you leave his career
of trolling usenet aside, he _does_ in fact write good tutorials on Emacs,
Linux, Mathematics and Lisp (even though he hates them all.)

~~~
jrockway
Hey, he wrote it, not me.

With that in mind; his Lisp advice is terrible. After years of writing Lisp
tutorials, he still hasn't actually learned it himself. Every time he comes up
with a convoluted way to write something very simple in Lisp; and then formats
it like he's writing C++. Very annoying. I ignore everything he says.

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henrikschroder
_This is where emacs comes in. Emacs has several find and replace commands, by
regex or by plain string, on a text selection, or entire file (buffer), or
multiple files. The beauty is that it works all in a interactive way, with the
option to do it in batch when you press a button._

Both Visual Studio and Eclipse have these features, I'm sure there are many,
many other editors and IDEs that also have them. It's not exactly rocket
science.

If you want to champion Emacs, you might want to point out the features that
really are unique and unmatched, instead of common features that everyone else
implemented 10 years ago. Yes, yes, Emacs did it 20 years ago. Woo.

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rbanffy
More like between 30 and 40 years ago, but yes.

What makes Emacs so useful is not only what it has out of the box (it has a
whole lot), but what it allows you to do with that. People often jokingly
describe it as an operating system, but that's a surprisingly apt description.
Everything in Emacs is accessible (most of it, anyway) and it is (a great part
of it, at least) written in itself. To make a small function that searches for
a, in this case, a booklike block, and replaces the classes with the proper
ones is more or less a trivial task. I wouldn't use it for this case - it's
too little work - but I would write a search-and-replace-with-option function
that would highlight occurrences and offer me a menu of replacements.

If it doesn't exist in there already.

And that would also be a worthwhile exercise in IDE zen.

Contrast that with Eclipse or Visual Studio, where the job of writing
extensions start to look like a whole career.

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fogus
Some of Erik Naggum's best flames were with Xah Lee in mind.
[http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/search?q=xah&sort=of](http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/search?q=xah&sort=of)

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DrJokepu
Not related to the article but related to the title of the article:

The only reason I use Emacs these days because it's the only decent freely
available Common Lisp development environment (in conjunction with SLIME). In
fact, I only use Emacs for Common Lisp. For everything else, there's vim /
Eclipse / IntelliJ / Visual Studio.

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RyanMcGreal
>However, if the markup is not 100% regular, the scripting approach won't
work.

Sounds like you need BeautifulSoup.

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JBiserkov
tl;dr; 99% of text is soup

Emacs has macros & M-x spoon

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tel
And a community of library writers so prolific that I actually went to check
to see if M-x spoon existed.

~~~
rbanffy
Now it does.

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pook
Why doesn't he actually step through the macro to format?

It's one thing to rave about Emacs, it's another thing to actually show its
power. A line of elisp would have been much more of an argument.

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Isamu
I've been enjoying it since TECO EMACS on the DEC-20, so it's a bit depressing
to me that still modern IDEs fall a bit short in basic areas (while adding
their own nice features, it's true.) I know it's not easy to build a full-
featured Emacs-equivalent, but jeeze, I've been going back to Emacs for almost
30 years now ... I've been expecting to be blown away by some new contender
for that long.

