Text Editor for Linux 3409

Your mindset is getting the best of you. I want to get work done, and could care less about ideology. (X)Emacs is the best tool. (And you've totally misunderstood the Unix philosophy anyway...)

You are describing a first week of use problem, as if *anything* users experience that early is a significant characteristic of a program they might well use for the next 3 decades.

If you are their guru, why not show them how to initialize (X)Emacs so that it won't do whatever they don't want done. I don't use it to browse the net, and I've *never* had to take off and try to do so when I'm editing (as opposed to when running GNUS, where that is in fact a supposedly desired functionality). (Which is to say, you made that one up, and it won't fly...)

Regardless, the point is that a text editor is not a *simple* tool, it does *require* a learning curve, and customizing it to your particular needs is essential (and relatively easy too). If you choose an editor based on the shortest learning curve, it also has the *least* usefulness before you are limited by whatitcan do instead of whatyouunderstand how to do. That's a fool's paradise.

You list emotional reasons not to use (X)Emacs in an effort to counter the facts which indicate it is a tool which can and will improve and speed up a user's editing functionality.

It still comes down to the same point though, which I mentioned in my first post to this thread: anything other than learning vi or emacs is *waste of time best avoided*.

(Now, as opposed to that... deciding which of vi or emacs to use is an argument with no end. Neither is necessarily better, but either one might fit any given person's preferences better.)

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