The Glory of Emacs

In the rush to eye candy, it seems sometimes that the most important part of written communication -- the words -- is sometimes forgotten. In the niche of the information society occupied by crusty Unix/Linux diehards, however, the word is still at the core of their communications. In some ways this is not surprising, since one of the distinguishing features of LInux is that its configuration files are virtually entirely human-readable text, as opposed to the obscure codes locked in the bowels of the Windows registry. Naturally, a operating system based on text needs a text editor -- or two, and a decades-long intramural rivalry among GNU/Linux users continues to bubble along over whether the vi editor or the emacs editor should be one's editor of choice. Of course, in some ways it is a false dichotomy; as one emacs proponent recently stated, it is like "comparing apples and combustion engines."

To my mind, you would be hard pressed to find a neater, cleaner piece of software than the vi text editor, whose beauty was forged in the crucible of the severe constraints of the early computer industry. With a minimum of code and a minimum of memory, vi was designed to be present on every Unix system so that programmers could edit text over achingly slow connections as the pea-brained monsters of the paleolithic computer world slowly emerged from the torpor of the punch-card era. VI had to be elegant and powerful; elegant so that it would gobble a minimum of precious computing resources and powerful so that it could efficiently edit significant amounts of code with great precision.

If vi is a surgeon's lancet, emacs is more like the fat Swiss Army knives that used to enthrall teenage boys with multiplicity of their blades -- a stainless steel tool for any occasion just waiting for a junior MacGyver to push it to its true limits. Emacs may not have the elegance of single purpose that vi does, but it does have the beauty of complexity and the fascination of what it is difficult (as the twentieth century's greatest master of text put it).

I have flirted with both vi and emacs over the years since I first encountered vi as an undergraduate, but I only began to use vi seriously about a year ago. It's a beautiful text editor, but I am finding now that I want to extend my reach beyond simply editing text. The new spark in my emacs romance initially flared as a result of my interest in a free self-validating XML editor. However, I was immediately diverted by emacs, built in news reader. Although USENET is largely a relic of the past, it turns out that the gnus news reader in emacs is well adapted to managing email. It took me almost two days to get the email/news function up and running on both my laptop and my desktop, but I think that the installation and configuration is now complete enough so that I can really begin to play with the email. The possibilities of a program designed for editing, with a powerful search engine based on regular expressions, and the capacity to thread and prioritize common themes in a fast text-based interface are enticing at the very least. It may not be the engine that associates all one's data with the email on the screen envisioned (and patented) by a friend of mine, but it would be a delicious irony if a decades old program were in fact the next leap forward in managing email.