Apology

[Scott Deerwester scott@cs.ust.hk]

I'd like to apologize for bringing up the topic of emacs here.  My
intention was to try to better understand Plan 9 as a practical
system.  The spirit of the original request was:

  Emacs has all of this wonderful functionality... Plan 9 *must*, but
  I don't see how.  Could somebody explain it to me?

I'm a person who likes Plan 9 a *lot* in principle, but who is having
a lot of trouble putting that into practice.  (I'm also having a lot
of trouble convincing anybody else at my institution to care, but
that's another issue.)  My productivity as a hacker depends strongly
on things that emacs gives me.  I (and presumably others who share my
"problem") need to see that moving to Plan 9 won't cut my productivity
in half.

The issue seemed to me to have a lot more to do with Plan 9 than emacs
-- I certainly had no intention to try to "convert" anybody to emacs.
The discussion has clarified the issue a lot; the thing wrong with
emacs (and *right* with Plan 9) is that emacs provides its
functionality in a nasty monolithic way instead of in a clean, modular
way.  Plan 9 gives you functionality similar to that of emacs, but
without forcing an editor to be anything but a good editor.

In any case, the thread has obviously offended several of you, so I'll
drop it... and go back to trying to get Plan 9 running on my notebook.
_________________________________________________________________
 Scott Deerwester            |   The Hong Kong University of
 Internet: scott@cs.ust.hk   |     Science and Technology
 Phone:    (852) 358-6985    |  Department of Computer Science
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