I link to a couple of e-mail list threads about my PostgreSQL hell on my home node, so I won't explain it all here, and I'll be brief about Emacs too. I'm avoiding all software that doesn't provide proper instructions for installation and use, despite whatever support community there may be. I visited this and related pages about Emacs and tried installing it yesterday, and encountered broken links and directories from which I was expected to know which of a long list of files to download. I chose the largest file, assuming that would increase my chances of getting all the files I need, then I tried following the instructions here. I got an error when trying to use that gunzip command, maybe because Windows XP doesn't really use an MSDOS command prompt.

I wanted to eventually take the advice diotalevi gave me in response to Perl editor idea and learn elisp, but I refuse to help build an editor that leaves such a bad first impression. Since Open Perl IDE is partially written in Perl, I might choose that editor to add my feature to.

This reminds me of the Perlmonks CSS font size hack. People are willing to add all kinds of advanced features to things when they still haven't gotten the basics done right. I'm pretty sure I could learn how to unpack and install the emacs file and I'm not looking for instructions, but emacs has made a bad second impression on me (the first was all the things I heard about it being difficult to use). Aside from my not wanting to support a product that doesn't provide decent installation instructions (or an installer), I don't want to have to deal with a poorly documented product.

I'm beginning to think that all the hype about open source and shareware being good is just the rationalization of young, liberal programmers who tend to want more freedom in general and can't afford to buy a decent product. Yes, there are choices besides emacs. I've already tried Crimson Editor and jedit, and I chose to go back to Wordpad. My experience with PostgreSQL was even worse, and I chose to build my own storage solution.

Such products will always have a minority following of people using less popular operating systems that the products probably work better with, but some users will deal with the setup and usage difficulties just because people they know use the product. The latter bunch are software groupies, and I REFUSE TO BE A GROUPIE!

In reply to PostgreSQL, Emacs, and other groupieware by Wassercrats

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