Re: Notepad; was: Re: Word editing question

[Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>]

David Neeley wrote:
> My point was that Notepad is *not* the only pure text editor on the block.
> There are many others that are often far more capable in many ways and that
> are also free.

Very much so. Read on (religious tract follows)...

Some of us are very happy with emacs, which can handle a lot of 
complicated manipulation of textual content, is good for writing 
programs (and indeed has editing modes devoted to most programming 
languages and to HTML), and is known for its horridly steep learning 
curve. Emacs's command set even shows up outside of emacs, as in the 
bash shell and underneath Framemaker, if you look at it slightly cross-eyed.

I have found or installed emacs on nearly every system I've used in the 
past few decades, including Linux, Unix, MS Windows, Cygwin, and Prime.

Enthusiasts of emacs find they have little use for other text editors, 
expecially notepad.

Emacs does not handle formatting in the MS Word sense. This is one of 
its good features. It handles text as ASCII or UTF-8, or whatever, with 
standard characters, not like MS Word's arcane internal codes. Want to 
separate your huge text file into two files, one that is to hold every 
paragraph that contains the word "frobnitz" and the other with those 
that don't, but with added line numbers? Piece of cake. Yes, one could 
write a Perl program to do that. But one (me, anyway) would use emacs to 
edit the Perl program, so why not just do it all in emacs? It's about 90 
seconds to write the "program" (a macro).

Oh, and emacs is extensible (you can customize the heck out of it), 
free, and has all source code available. It was originally developed, 
over 30 years ago, by the legendary Richard M. Stallman, who has not let 
age get in the way of iconclasm.
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