edit: Most of the floss world respects people who take the time to learn something before asking questions. So long as you dig about and frame an intelligent question backed by openly available information (did you RTFM :) ), the people worth respecting aren't going to trash you. I don't contribute to emacs myself, it does pretty much everything I could ever need. I would be happy to help you with floss norms and so forth... contact info in my profile. :-)