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Editors: Emacs is the Only OS You Need
Mon, 12 Dec 2005

Just stumbled across this quote from the eminent science fiction author Neal Stephenson about my preferred text editor - Emacs. I've read this before, but it just makes me hyperventilate.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

For those non-computer-science folks, Emacs is a text editor; its not really easy to use, and its not for things like fonts or underlining .. it just does text. Flexible beyond belief, to the point where many people jokingly refer to it as an operating system (though it lacks threading :P) Other modern editors and environments are more fancy with all sorts of magic voodoo going on, but they still generally are playing catch up in terms of Pure Editing Power.

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