Re: text editors

[John Hasler <jhasler@newsguy.com>]

David writes:
> So we're left wondering why you've stated that learning emacs
> necessarily involves learning lisp, either beforehand or at the same
> time.

Probably because Emacs advocates often over-enthuse about extensibility,
giving the erroneous impression that knowing how to write extensions is a
necessary part of knowing how to use Emacs.

In fact, much of what we now know as Emacs *is* extensions written in
Elisp and many more extensions are available.  You no more need to know
Elisp to use them or to install additional ones than you need to know C
to use Vim.

There is also the fact that the configuration file is written in Elisp
and one once had to know at least a tiny bit of Elisp to edit it.  Now
there is a configuration interface to handle that but the myth lingers
on, along with the myth that one needs to memorize hundreds of esoteric
escape sequences.
-- 
John Hasler 
jhasler@newsguy.com
Elmwood, WI USA