The Modernization of Emacs

[Bjorn Borud]

[Martin Gregorie <martin at see.sig.for.address>]
|
| Yep, and the same people think a command line is to be avoided at all
| costs. "I mean, its so /last century/ and you can't do anything useful
| with it anyway".

I have a friend who is a carpenter.  he switched to Linux a few years
ago because he was tired of how slow windows was and how easily it was
infested with malware.  he really, really doesn't give a toss what it
says on the tin, he's a _user_ and that's it.  to my surprise, finds
Linux as easy, if not easier to use, than windows.  (he still has to
use windows for his invoicing system.  everything else he does in
Linux).

I have observed similar opinions in other non-computer-freaks.  people
who see the computer only as a tool and are only interested in getting
the job done.  they have a surprising preference for Linux.  (not many
of them have ever been exposed to OSX though, and I'd suspect they'd
prefer that since it is far more streamlined).

| Obligatory OT comment: right now I have two xterm sessions open with
| which I've been writing a Swing/JDBC app using nowt but a bash shell,
| cvs, microEmacs and (of course) J2SE. I don't need no steenking IDE.

I used J2SE, Ant, Emacs, Xterm, bash and Firefox as my main tools when
I wrote most of my production Java code.  and it is not exactly what
you'd call "hobbyist projects" either. :-)

-Bjørn