Another Why I Use Emacs

Kasim Tuman has a nice blog post entitled Why Emacs in which he discusses why he likes Emacs and his strategy for getting the most out of it. His viewpoint is interesting and worth reading.

Tuman thinks of Emacs as a workbench that evolves with your changing requirements to always provide a perfect fit for your current needs. One way of looking at Emacs is exactly that: it’s a workbench or toolbox for working with text. Tuman looks at it as a library for working with text. Of course, it’s much more but in its guise as an editor, that’s a good description.

Tuman takes a contrarian view by recommending that you don’t start with someone else’s configuration or with one of the prebuilt configurations. The real power of Emacs, he says, is that you can mold it to be exactly what you want it to be and to do that most efficiently you should build up your own configuration from a bare-bones Emacs. There’s much to be said for the opposite viewpoint, of course, but I take his point that if you want to make Emacs truly yours, you’re going to have to do it yourself by building your own configuration. That’s what I did—but only because there were no prebuilt configurations when I started—and it worked out well for me.

Finally, Tuman reminds us—or at least me—that the info menu command, the m key, works on any menu and that includes the top level directory node. So if you want to read, say, the Bash info file you can go there quickly and easily by typing Ctrl+h i m bash. I’m always forgetting that and doing something stupid like searching for the proper node when all I need to do is invoke menu.

There’s nothing startlingly new in Tuman’s post but he does have a unique way of looking and things and that makes for an interesting read.

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