On 2019.03.27 09:37, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 09:00:07AM -0500, John Hasler wrote:tomás writes: > It /is/ a steep learning curve at the beginning (I can confirm, having > come from vi, then vim -- in which I'm still fluent). But it is worth > every turn in that panoramic route.
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I think that one problem people have with Emacs is that they think theyneed to learn all of it before they can use it.
...As well as being easy to use for general word processing, Emacs excels in the work of writing scripts, in which the "COMPOSE-A-NEW-MACRO-WHENEVER-YOU-NEED-IT;IT-TAKES-ONLY-A-FEW-SECONDS" ability of Emacs is invaluable. After all, the name Emacs is an acronym for "Editing MACroS".
Need to make alterations to dozens of lines? If you can figure out a repetitive sequence of keystrokes to accomplish the change, you can save that sequence as a macro. And those keystrokes can involve searches and operations such as "advance one word", "go to string xxYYz", "go to end of line", "replace xxx with yyy", and so forth.
Each time you need to do something which is impossible or would take forever with a rodent-dependent editor, you need to stop a minute and search for the way to do it with Emacs; that is the way you learn Emacs -- when you have motivation.
O'Reilly published a marvelous book on Emacs, "Learning GNU Emacs", in which author Debra Cameron takes the reader from the state of "complete novice" to "power user".
An Emacs guru who has been of great benefit to me is Xah Lee, who has written a tutorial:
http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs.html as well as much material on Emacs; check out his blog: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/blog.html