In particular, emacs supports a wiki-like style of development in the following ways:
- hide-ifdef mode selectively hides debugging code
- powerful ubiquitous search-and-replace
- a community of developers sharing enhancements
- version control support
Emacs is not a Smalltalk/
VisualAge browser system, and they have their advantages too. On the other hand, emacs can be used for editing all kinds of files on all kinds of systems.
If you want to be even more like wiki then try WikiMode which gives you wiki-like text editing and browsing.
Yow! Selective Undo: select an area of text, then press C-u C-_ (undo with a prefix argument). This undoes the last change to the selected region, even if you've later made changes to some other area. You can repeat it. How cool!
- EmacsRules if you love to memorize commands like Ctrl-Shift-Escape-Hold Your Left Foot-T.
- It's better than navigating endless cascades of menus only to find your hard-won knowledge from version 5.1 is useless in version 5.1-mk2.
- EmacsRules if you like editors with a psychoanalyze-pinhead function. (my favorite is "phase-of-moon")
- It rules when you realize extension languages rule, and extension languages that were built to be TuringComplete are better than ones that kind of fell into TuringCompleteness? one ugly ad-hoc hack after another.
- A person wanting a less bloated editor said: Emacs Sucks. This is not juvenile disparagement, but rather an observation that it is large enough to generate a noticeable gravitational field.
- Emacs is tiny compared to most of the programs we use now. It was huge for 1985, but no longer. On my machine right now, it's occupying 14 megabytes, compared to 34 megabytes for Mozilla. Yes, it's about five times larger than a vim process, but it also does a lot more.
- Here's a nickel. Get yourself some more RAM.
- EmacsRules if you enjoy well designed, consistent key strokes which perform a 'logical' function, appropriate to each type of file being visited. So M-e is end of sentence in text, and end of statement in C, end of S-expression in lisp, etc.
- This is why Emacs ought to be described as a document editor, which is a higher-level concept than a text editor: Documents are composed of structures and certain transformations are valid on those structures, whereas text files are simply a stream of characters. Emacs tries hard to make it easy to only apply sensical transformations, but it doesn't absolutely enforce anything.
- EmacsRules if you enjoy an editor which puts few (or no) constraints on you. In emacs, any buffer (including the command, or minibuffer) is just another buffer. You can use any editing keys in it and switchto/from it at any time. None of that insanity you get in certain word processors where you can remap keys to do something, but your keymap is invalid while editing a popup field. Or while editing a popup field, you cannot switch back to your main window to alter something and then return and fill in the popup.
- To be fair, Emacs still has the minibuffer and that is effectively modal in this sense. It's still a lot less annoying in practice because Emacs has extensive autocomplete and it doesn't pop a new window in your face. New windows seem to break concentration quite effectively.
- EmacsRules. They come in orange, blueberry, purple... oh wait, I mean iMacsRule. Sorry, my mistake.
I love emacs. I've been using it for around 4 years and I've started to get the hang of it. I'd say that emacs has a lot in common with Wiki. Simple idea, designed to grow, has grown immensely based on users' work and input. It saddens me to think that some people don't appreciate it. Fortunately I work for a company where apparently everybody does all their development, email, etc, in emacs so I don't have to deal with Unbelievers anymore ;-)
On the other hand, I'm so dependent on Emacs that I'm stuck with it one way or the other...
... in fact, my favorite thing about emacs is regularly finding or creating new features that I can't believe I lived without. I'm going to start recording the GreatEmacsFeatures that I find. -- LukeGorrie
Of course. How else would you read your mail, usenet news, and
visit WikiWiki? Not to mention all those other pesky "work" things, like revision control, debugging etc. --AlainPicard
DanBarlow did a weblog entry about extending Emacs: "This is what I mean by a scriptable user interface..." http://ww.telent.net/diary/2003/1/#14.28515
CategoryEmacs
Emacs Rules