Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu>]

me@privacy.net writes:

> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>
> and gNus

While this probably isn't the right newsgroup for it...

My computing life is almost entirely under Linux.  At work I'm
fortunate enough to use a Red Hat derivative; at home I run KUbuntu, a
KDE-based Debian derivative.  Emacs has an incredible amount of power
and I've gotten it configured to do what I like; I've had a lot of
trouble getting other editors and environments (e.g. KDE's "advanced
text editor", Eclipse) to do the same sorts of things that I want.

In the modern world, Emacs is kind of a middle-weight process -- Eight
Megabytes And Constantly Swapping might have been an issue ten years
ago but now it's nothing on PC-class systems where gigabytes of memory
are approaching the norm.  I still find it too heavyweight for
command-line use, so I will use vi (or occasionally even ed) for
things like editing configuration files.  The flip side of this is
that, since desktop environments now typically make heavy use of
off-white colors and antialiased fonts, Emacs looks barren and jagged
against the rest of my desktop.

What do I use Emacs for?  General-purpose text editing, including
especially writing longer things in LaTeX and editing XML (XSLT, XML
Schema, XHTML, ...) files (yay nxml-mode).  Any coding happens pretty
exclusively inside Emacs (C, C++, Haskell, make, Python, ...).  And of
course all of my non-work email gets read inside Gnus.

My Gnus setup uses an IMAP mail-source fetched into an nnml backend
stored on an AFS networked filesystem.  I use spam-stat.el to sort out
spam from ham.  This combination of things makes starting up Gnus a
little slow.  I also have one nntp server that I read a couple of
newsgroups (including this one) off of.

Right now I have three Emacsen running on three different machines.
One of them is running Gnus.  This is a pretty normal daily state of
affairs for me.

  --dzm