I quite like to read about the computer setup of other people and
why they are using what they are using. As far as we are talking
about free and open source software, it tells you something about
the person in general and not only about their technological
preferences. It is a bit like looking at other people's book
shelves at home: it reveals something about their interests, their
attitude, their character.
One question in "The Linux Setup" (an interview series by Steven
Ovadia) reads: "What one piece of (Linux) software do you depend
on? Why is it so important?" For me this "one piece of software"
is definitely emacs though this comes somehow as a surprise to
myself as emacs appears to contradict the UNIX philosophy. (But
that's another topic.)
Sometimes I feel that I should do more to overthrow certain emacs
myths, e.g. that emacs is hard to learn, especially because of its
awkward key-combinations. Every emacs user is special but over the
years that I followed discussions and was looking for advice I
realized that I have often quite a different take on things. This
is basically, because it's highly unlikely that someone like me
will start to use emacs.
When I first used emacs I didn't even know what a text editor
is. This was because I did never edit a text file before (or at
least I didn't know that I did). I had not worked from the command
line before. I had almost no experience with Linux (or other
UNIX-like systems). Let alone any programming skills. I was with
one word very ill-prepared for a piece of software like emacs. At
least that's what people think. Though I do not agree.
I started to use emacs because of org-mode. I was looking for a
program to manage my daily tasks and the plain text approach of
org-mode had a certain appeal to me. That it only ran inside of
emacs didn't seem a problem: I had to learn org-mode so I could
learn emacs as well. (Sometimes naivety and cluelessness can lead
to great results.)
I would say that learning org-mode was a challenge compared to
which emacs seemed a piece of cake. Don't get me wrong: I only
know a tiny fraction of all the million things that you can do
with emacs but usually I will not get into trouble because of what
I do not know.
But there is one basic but very important lesson to learn about
emacs: Do not refer to it as an editor because this will give you
an entirely wrong idea of what it actually is. I like to look at
it as an elisp interpreter. That means that you can program it to
do whatever you want it to do. If you like this idea then you will
always be happy with emacs.
