Re: Taking the emacs plunge

I would suggest XEmacs for a few reasons. Mainly, its available for Win2k and Linux. While you are transitioning over, you can start using it now. Second, its a lot easier to use than terminal Emacs, so the learning curve won't be as steep. As I'm still learning it myself, I can't give you a lot of hints. What I can tell you is that you don't need to know Lisp. You should get along fine without knowing it.

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Re: Re: Taking the emacs plunge by BazB (Priest) on Apr 27, 2002 at 17:13 UTC
I personally favour XEmacs 21.4.x myself - the default settings seem a little nicer (i.e. cperl-mode setup) than in GNU Emacs, and the XEmacs package system is great. I use both GNU Emacs and XEmacs - they both do the job. I should point out that GNU Emacs (i.e. vanilla Emacs) is available for Linux too - most Linux distros will ship a version of GNU Emacs, and if not, then you can always get the source and build it yourself. (Redhat certainly offers both GNU Emacs and XEmacs). Secondly, you can use GNU Emacs under X and get nice windows, colours and all the other things you'd expect. On a similar vein, just because XEmacs has an X in the name, doesn't mean you can't use it in a terminal. Update: Oh, and as far as learning Lisp goes, understanding the very basics (that everything is a list and how functions are defined is probably enough) should allow you to understand the config file a little better, but there is no need to know any Lisp to be able to use (X)Emacs fluently.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Taking the emacs plunge
by BazB (Priest) on Apr 27, 2002 at 17:13 UTC

I personally favour XEmacs 21.4.x myself - the default settings seem a little nicer (i.e. cperl-mode setup) than in GNU Emacs, and the XEmacs package system is great.
I use both GNU Emacs and XEmacs - they both do the job.

I should point out that GNU Emacs (i.e. vanilla Emacs) is available for Linux too - most Linux distros will ship a version of GNU Emacs, and if not, then you can always get the source and build it yourself. (Redhat certainly offers both GNU Emacs and XEmacs).

Secondly, you can use GNU Emacs under X and get nice windows, colours and all the other things you'd expect.
On a similar vein, just because XEmacs has an X in the name, doesn't mean you can't use it in a terminal.

Update: Oh, and as far as learning Lisp goes, understanding the very basics (that everything is a list and how functions are defined is probably enough) should allow you to understand the config file a little better, but there is no need to know any Lisp to be able to use (X)Emacs fluently.

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