| Emacs is Awesome |
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Thursday, November 5th, 2015 19:28:20 GMT |
| Software |
Today I found out the Emacs editor has a web browser built in, called EWW, which stands for "Emacs Web Wowser". :-)
I was actually able to use it to browse Astroblahhh Desktop!
It even was capable of displaying the ABDesktop file organizer's thumbnail images, and also was able to open the image files full-size right inside of Emacs.
The formatting of ABDesktop's listers is far from perfect inside the Emacs web browser, partly because by default, long lines get truncated rather than wrapped. Thumbnail images get displayed at the bottom of the lister instead of next to each file record.
But wow... web browsing inside of Emacs!! Wow!!!
And there's Tetris, among other games. And the Emacs Psychotherapist, available in the Help menu. :-D
And, years ago, I was able to get quite comfortable with the many different keyboard commands in games like Steamband, to the point where I almost never had to check the manual for what keys to press to do certain things.
So, it's encouraging to think that, given that I achieved that with some games, I should hopefully be able to get pretty far dealing with tons of different keyboard commands in Emacs.
It also works great with the multifile created by the multifiles.el add-on I mentioned in my previous blog post.
Years ago I read some articles talking about how wonderful Lisp is, which made me curious enough to try Lisp (not inside Emacs) in Windows, but, I never got very far with it back then.
But perhaps now I finally have advanced far enough as a programmer to finally grasp Lisp a lot better, and do something useful with it. Hope so, since that might be the only way I'll be able to add the new features I'd like to have in multifiles.el.
If I ever start liking Lisp more than my current favorite language, PHP, I'll let you all know.
There are so many different keyboard commands (or "keychords") in Emacs. It's rather daunting, but, fortunately, they're reputedly all customizable.
I already found a nice bookmark add-on called Breadcrumb, which works the way I wished I could figure out how to make bookmarks in Geany and Notepad++ work. Breadcrumb is capable of bringing you to locations in different files, instead of only locations inside the current file, just by pressing a single key to go the next bookmark. F2 in my case, just like Notepad++.
I'm also quite excited about the fact that there's an entire programming language embedded inside of Emacs, called Emacs Lisp. I've been reading An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, which is very helpful.