Inevitable Emacs

September 8, 2008

About seven years ago I changed my editor-of-choice from Emacs to vi
(and more recently to ed). I still respected Emacs, but got tired of
trying to maintain multiple configurations for all the different
platforms I use, and for the mostly small editing I usually do wanted
a tool that was ready as soon as I hit Enter, instead of waiting for
Emacs to boot-up.

For a brief time I was a heavy user of some of Emacs' PIM
applications. They were very powerful, and very flexible (outside
Emacs because data was kept in text files, and inside Emacs if you
want to muck around in Emacs Lisp). My departure from the Emacs fold
ended this affair.

Even after I bought a Zaurus SL-C860 and gained the ability to run
Unix-style applications in the palm of my hand, I gave Emacs no more
than a passing thought, assuming the Zaurus's restricted memory and
keyboard would render the editor nothing more than resource-hogging
wallpaper, if it ran at all. Even after noting in the book "Linux
Zaurus Super Guide" that running Emacs was indeed possible, I didn't
bother to try it since I was well-used to "slimmer" editors, and
wanted to exploit the Zaurus's pre-installed graphic PIM tools.

However, I've never been thrilled with the Zaurus PIM tools. They
have only limited ability