After A Year, Emacswiki Alternative Shutting Down 127
About a year ago, someone decided that EmacsWiki was outdated and unorganized, to the detriment of the Emacs community. So, he started a new wiki (WikiEmacs, choosing Mediawiki instead of Oddmuse, and attempting to give it a saner organizational structure). In the end, his project failed to grain traction, and it's shutting down for the greater good of Emacs: "I want to extend a big public apology to Alex Schroeder for my harsh criticism of EmacsWiki. One year later I see that stewarding documentation projects and nurturing a healthy community around them is much harder than writing software. I’m but a humble software engineer and you’ll have to forgive me for my misguided actions. I hope that something good has(will) come up from all this drama. At the very least I urge everyone who cares for EmacsWiki to try and clean up, extend and improve at least a couple of articles on subjects that are of importance to him. I know that’s something I’ll be doing from now on."
Re:The "emacs community"?? (Score:3, Informative)
emacs is an editor? On what planet?
As far as I recall, emacs is a conglomeration of a lot of things, one of which happens to be an editor...
Re:The "emacs community"?? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the issue is that vi or rm, however dear to their users are mostly viewed as a tool, a damn good one but still a tool. But Emacs really does have a caring community around it. For example, most people in the Lisp/Scheme community use Emacs, and not by coincidence. Emacs is really a miniature programming platform for developing applications written in a version of Lisp, complete with a compiler, interpreter, debugger, and a virtual machine. Emacs's text editor itself is a Lisp application. As you can imagine, Lisp people take a special pride in this.
Next, it was already mentioned that Emacs is more than a text editor. It's almost a complete work environment. In a typical emacs session you can have multiple windows, buffers, frames open for editing multiple files, running shells, interpreters, build scripts, info sessions, etc all running at the same time.
Re:Improved everything except the owner's motivati (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The "emacs community"?? (Score:4, Informative)
When I can have a dozen ttys open on virtual consoles, why on earth would I bother doing it all inside X?
Or more seriously, if I run a shell inside Emacs, then I have all the editing commands of Emacs at my fingertips. shell-command-on-region is an obvious one that saves a lot of head this/tail that to narrow down the part of the previous command that I want to operate on for the next command in the pipe.
There are many reasons to use M-x shell (Score:4, Informative)
If you are running commands that outputs a lot of text in the terminal the search capability of emacs is really useful as well.
Another use case is the integration between macros, text buffers, and terminals. Consider a use case where you are editing an HTML file and want to ensure that all images referred to in IMG tags are available at a remote location. It is then easy to create a macro in emacs that finds all IMG tags, extract the file name and copy the file name to a suitable scp command that you can paste into the terminal window.
However, I must admit that I still have a few xterms open, but I find myself gravitating towards running shell commands in a shell buffer in emacs, especially when programming. Also, there are of course other ways to solve all of these issues (scripting, file redirection, etc), but for myself I usually find myself preferring to use emacs in most of these cases.