Re:Emacs Timeline
by bitwize on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @06:20PM
(#32337245)
Kind of, almost by force. I was trying out Linux back in 1995, coming from Windows. Going from Windows to Linux back then was a bit like switching from a brand new economy sedan to one of those cars built out of scrap by Immortan Joe and his War Boys. Everything was so janky and cobbled together, but extremely powerful, it seemed, compared to what you left behind. It would be close to another year before some German Amigaheads put together the first Linux desktop worth taking seriously -- KDE.
So when I programmed on Windows, I used an IDE -- typically Borland C++ or Microsoft Visual C++. When I wanted to program for Linux -- ???
There was no equivalent. I had to use my old-school Unix skills and write the code in a text editor, then use the compiler and make to put it all together in an executable. I started with -- pico, was it? But a friend told me Emacs was really great and the editor to use if you're a programmer. I'd heard the name Emacs from Micro Emacs on the Amiga, but apparently this was big boy Emacs.
It came with Slackware, so I fired it up. And holy crap. It seemed unspeakably powerful and live-codable. I would only get a sense for its true power over years of working with it -- to code, to write HTML pages and stories. It had a web browser, email client, and IRC client. It had games! All written in Emacs Lisp. Blew my damn mind at the time.
The skill ceiling for Emacs is tremendously high, it's not something you will pick up easily. But for me it was well worth learning. I won't call myself proficient in it, but I can do things with it and shape it to my exact needs in ways Visual Studio (Code) can't match, live, as I use it. To me it's worth its weight in gold.
So when I programmed on Windows, I used an IDE -- typically Borland C++ or Microsoft Visual C++. When I wanted to program for Linux -- ???
There was no equivalent. I had to use my old-school Unix skills and write the code in a text editor, then use the compiler and make to put it all together in an executable. I started with -- pico, was it? But a friend told me Emacs was really great and the editor to use if you're a programmer. I'd heard the name Emacs from Micro Emacs on the Amiga, but apparently this was big boy Emacs.
It came with Slackware, so I fired it up. And holy crap. It seemed unspeakably powerful and live-codable. I would only get a sense for its true power over years of working with it -- to code, to write HTML pages and stories. It had a web browser, email client, and IRC client. It had games! All written in Emacs Lisp. Blew my damn mind at the time.
The skill ceiling for Emacs is tremendously high, it's not something you will pick up easily. But for me it was well worth learning. I won't call myself proficient in it, but I can do things with it and shape it to my exact needs in ways Visual Studio (Code) can't match, live, as I use it. To me it's worth its weight in gold.