sacha chua living an awesome life

Reposted with permission because (a) it shows that people who aren’t computer geeks can also love Emacs, and (b) it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling and encouraged me to keep writing, so I want to keep it around just in case I get in a rut again.

Sacha,

I’m an emacs newbie who’s trying to both simplify and empower my computing life, and I’ve chosen emacs as the tool to do that. I’m pretty excited about that, and overwhelmed, too.

Actually, a little background might help: I’m a PhD student in early modern (read: renaissance) English literature. Yeah, I’m a Shakespeare guy. I work in a field in which computers are, to most folks, MS Word, MS Entourage, and MS Explorer. I’m a nut who actually plays with stuff. (Actually, I don’t tell my colleagues about it. It could honestly damage my career. I know, it’s disturbing.) I also have some tech chops, being a refugee from the heady late 1990s tech boom where I co-founded a small company that made some money before it collapsed. I’ve been able to do the basics in emacs for years. The basics, but nothing more.

My introduction this time was a rather circuitous route: I moved from Mellel (on the Mac), to Scrivener where I discovered the wonders of MultiMarkdown. Happily I discovered that I could use MMD and TextMate to create LaTeX files without having to look at a bunch of distracting LaTeX markup. I could write plain text and, with a couple of handy keystrokes, create beautiful PDF files that my committee would appreciate. The plain text files took up no space and could be edited anywhere. I could fit a bazillion of them on my USB drive and carry loads of research with me to my office on campus (where I got a hand-me-down Dell running XP v.e.r.y.s.l.o.w.l.y) and on my much speedier Mac at home and even in Linux. Neat. Still, MMD felt hack-y and was only supported by one guy and I wondered if there was anything else like it out there.

Which lead me to muse-mode. From there you can guess my path of discovery: org-mode, planner-mode, remember: oh my!

For a prose writer like myself, the ability to have the cursor jump forward and backward by letter, word, line, and paragraph was nothing new, but M-a and M-e have changed my life. Why don’t all word/text processors understand that the sentence is the fundamental unit of prose writing? Why don’t they all allow me to navigate using units that make logical sense?

Whoever said that emacs was for programmers only surely isn’t a writer.

(This is becoming much longer than I had anticipated, sorry.) My point in writing is to tell you how invaluable I have found your two public chapters (I think they’re 7 and 8) have been for me. The whole idea of writing a book about emacs as cool (as opposed to just highly functional) is both obvious and revolutionary. Know that I would buy a copy today if only it were available.

I noticed in your blog that you felt you had lost some steam on the book. Please don’t. My life is better, my writing is better, my research is better, and, much to the joy of my wife, my progress toward a completed PhD is better, all thanks to emacs which, based on the tools I’m using, is also in thanks to you.

So thank you, and keep writing. I, for one, and hungry for more. I’m sure others are, too.

Jeffrey Windsor

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