Fun with Emacs
 I just got done wrestling
the Win32 port of Emacs 21.2 onto my Windows 2000 system. Now I have an
emacs trifecta. It's running on all the platforms I have around here:
Linux, Win2k, and OS X.
I've decided that emacs is a good strategic choice for me. I'm going
to really learn it. The pluses are:
- The cross-platform versions
- The incredible customization possibilities
- The wealth of third-party packages
- The fact that it's going to be around for a long time
- Highly gratifying for touch typists
- Perhaps the most well documented application on the planet
- Transparent internals (e.g., simple.el, the browsable file
containing the program's core functionality)
The downside is that, well, it's an editor and not a word processor.
Emacs has a way to go before it can easily produce presentation-quality
documents. Stallman intends to take it into that direction, however. The
new redisplay engine in Emacs 21 is progress, but oh it seems slow.
(An aside: I'll never forget the day at Linuxcare in December 1999 when
Stallman visited Linuxcare fo
r an interview by Nick Moffit, Jim
Schweizer, and my Sputnik colleague Dave Sifry. I attended to prepare
the transcript for the Web site. Stallman demonstrated emacs 21, then
still unreleased, and showed off the redisplay engine, of which he
seemed quite proud. It was the first of four occassions on which I've
met Stallman. No question he's one odd individual, but it's also
apparent he's a genius.)
Another big problem with emacs today is the lame outliner. It's Tom's
own Major Pipe Dream to contribute some code to that module and make
much better. Had emacs the capabilities of something like, say, Omni
Outliner, would that not be sweet!
Decent outlining would greatly improve emacs's potential as a
structured authoring tool. Aiming at the goal from another direction is
PSGML major-mode and the XAE (XML Authoring Environment) package from
xxx. XAE integrates emacs and an enhanced psgml mode with the Saxon XSLT
processor and the DocBook DTD and Norm Walsh's DocBook XML style sheets.
If you can survive the learning curve, emacs/XAE may just be the best
DocBook authoring tool out there, with display of the transformed output
integrated right into the editor.
I'm going to be installing XAE over the holiday weekend and I'll let you
know how it goes.
12:29:06 AM 
|
