I used BRIEF for a few years until I moved away from strictly Windows development so I moved back to Emacs. Columnar editing was something I missed so much! But now that I've been away from it, it's hard for me to recall what I used to use it for.
Occasionally I do find that I wish I had it, but I remember feeling so crippled without it for a long time! So, can't wait to get back into it again now that it's available. I think it's one of those things that you start using it and find more and more things to do with it as time goes on. Just my $0.02 anyway.
I can already kill (C-x r k), yank (C-x r y), replace (C-x r t) text in rectangles, insert text after the rectangle (C-x r z) or at the beginning of all the rectangle lines (C-x r a) or their ends (C-x r e).
What else is there?
http://emacsredux.com/blog/2014/01/01/a-peek-at-emacs-24-dot...
I'm curious to know which things are easier for you with 'C-x space'.
The annoying thing about C-x space, is that it used to do something completely different (set gud breakpoint), but I digress.
Really? Upon reading the release notes, I was excited that I'd probably be able to just use commands like C-w or C-x u to act on rectangles. Sad to see it won't be the case.
From the manual: The command C-x C-k r (apply-macro-to-region-lines) repeats the last defined keyboard macro on each line that begins in the region. It does this line by line, by moving point to the beginning of the line and then executing the macro.
At one point there were only two web browsers in the world, one was Mosaic (Mozilla is short for Mosaic Killer) and one was W3 (the emacs web browser).
* Email (gnus)
* NNTP (gnus)
* IRC
Come to mind offhand.
It's a surprisingly nice experience. You can really easily pull archives, nntp clients tend to handle threading well, etc.
I really prefer the keyboard navigation and all the niceties offered by Thunderbird than the web groups interface, each with its own set of allowed actions, mostly without keyboard navigation.
http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....
There was a project to integrate webkit into an emacs browser mode but not sure where that stands.
w3m is an external program, which Emacs has a wrapper for http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3m
The problem is that it isn't a good enough Lisp engine to be very good at anything beyond the great text editor, which it has been since the early 1980's.
Avoiding the really hard problems and building a better emacs browser doesn't really help anyone. At some point, people will realize that the concept behind Emacs is great but could be better done in another high performance language. JavaScript in a browser? Clojure?
I use Emacs as a text editor, which means I use it to edit anything that has text. Granted that is a huge part of my computing needs.
I don't want Emacs to be able to do anything. I already have an operating system and a text editor.
"We used the same idea here (in the hybrid technique), that most of the editor would be written in Lisp, but certain parts of it that had to run particularly fast would be written at a lower level"
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
That's the beauty of Emacs. Considering that he built it in the early 80s, you have to wonder if the whole thing couldn't be written Lisp today.
I use emacs as a source navigation and exploration tool, even more than for text editing. Its ability to run code customized to the language and projects I'm working on is far more important than its ability to edit text.
I actually don't like a lot of its text editing functionality, and had to work hard to get things like selection, tab indenting, scrolling etc. to work in a way that didn't drive me up the walls. I had to give up on virtual space, one of the things that stopped me learning it 10 years ago. It's also very hard to record keyboard macros without accidentally cancelling (I tend to press C-g reflexively when I type a wrong shortcut); I use multiple cursors these days instead, even though that is much riskier / harder to use when you can't see the whole buffer / all edit locations on screen at once.
A browser, I don't really need that per se - unless it's linked to library documentation. But it's hard to integrate modern docs without at least understanding HTML, if not HTTP. So I can see the need for a browser implementation.
If you only use Emacs as a text editor, that's fine for using a subset of it. Just like a casual user uses Linux without never using its underlying tools in the terminal.
> saying that Emacs is only a Lisp interpreter implies that the entirety of the text editor is implemented in Lisp, which is clearly not the case.
With this argument, I guess Python is also not an interpreter because clearly it is not entirely written in Python.
I couldn't get logins to bitbucket work with eww, because it seems it is not sending the referrer headers. I couldn't find any way to turn it on..