Over at LWN.net, Jake Edge has a book review of Mickey Peterson’s excellent Mastering Emacs. Edge is a long time Emacs user who never got around to really mastering the editor. Through a long process starting with a fascination with Lisp, Edge became determined to learn more about Emacs. Part of that journey involved finding and reading Mastering Emacs.
Edge notes that the book takes a long time to get to actually editing text. Rather, it spends time nailing down the terminology and philosophy behind Emacs. He says, and I agree, that that was an excellent approach. As he says, Peterson approaches the material in a way that make sense for a narrative rather than a reference. He also says that although the organization of the book may seem a bit strange at first, the key to understanding it and Emacs is to recognize that Emacs is a tinkerer’s editor.
When he got to the editing part of the book, Edge discovered that actions in Emacs are subtly different from other editors. For example, when you “kill” text you don’t delete it, you merely move it to the kill ring. That means it available for reinsertion elsewhere, where “elsewhere” means some place in the same buffer or even in another buffer. In fact, with the proper configuration, you can even insert it into a completely separate application.
Another interesting part of the post is the comments. Other than a long, silly, and ultimately pointless argument over whether the book is somehow evil for not being “free”, they tell the story of how other users came to know and champion Emacs.
If, like me, you enjoy other people’s Emacs stories, this is a nice article. And, as I say, the comments are worth a bit of time too.