My brother, who is exactly unlike me in that he has no computer training, and hates reading, once automated a system using Microsoft Excel macros when his supervisors had told him to use Liquid Paper! I once saw a research assistant filling in cells in a spreadsheet one by one with the same data; she did it really fast, but she did it a lot faster after I told her about "Fill Down."

I too worked myself out of a few jobs as a temp, but not like I could today with my automation skills. I agree with you: people would not see a problem with automation if they would stop holding themselves down by saying "I'm not a programmer."

Incidentally, one of the reasons I recommend using Emacs is to "dupe" people into becoming programmers. When there's a way to automate repetitive tasks, like those encountered in editing, people see the opportunity for changing their way of thinking.

At the new job I fight the automation battle daily. The willingness to work around "little problems" every single time they come up, as a matter of procedure, makes my brain boil.

"This should be a single-click/perl script/canned query!" comes out of my mouth at least 3-4 times a day.

The irony of course is that I've plateaued in my emacs use far below a 'power user' level, and rarely automate squat in it. Too funny.

Hello Mike,

My Emacs usage goes in cycles. I'll go months without a single piece of elisp originating, then I will spend a whole day on it. It's never too late to start. One of the best things about Emacs is that you can use it at so many levels. You're not required to be a power user, but you can become one in less than a week at any time in your usage career.

Brilliant way to look at it, Joel. =) It's great to use tools with depth to them. And customizability! Oh my.

Mike: If you think of Emacs as part of an entire system - together with Perl, and shell scripts, and whatever else you've got - then it doesn't really matter what tool you use or how deeply you grok it, as long as you can figure out how to make stuff happen (and have fun along the way).

That said, you can pick up plenty of inspiration by reading through the manual for your tools, other people's tweaks and customizations (http://www.emacswiki.org and http://planet.emacsen.org are awesome), and even the source code (it's there!). A large part of being able to automate things is simply knowing what's out there. For example, automating cool stuff in Perl is much easier when you know about CPAN (http://www.cpan.org), how to search it (http://search.cpan.org), and the probability that someone has already contributed a module that does whatever you need (very close to 1). Ditto Emacs and the Emacswiki.

I call that "entire system" Unix, but you can call it whatever you want ;)

I definitely need a pull forward. My comfort level actually what's thwarting me now. (Well, that and a nigh on 20 year old .emacs file.)

(you forgot the kungfu masters over at perlmonks :) )

Oh, yes. And Q&A forums like StackOverflow, and other great places to learn. Sometimes, when I'm pretty happy with my setup, I'll help out on forums or IRC channels. Helping with other people's questions gives me an excuse to learn more, and other people's cool ideas often make me think, "Hmm, I want to do that too!"

See, this is why I love coming here. Now I' m all fired up.

Incidentally, right now I have 6 emacs processes running. XEmacs on xp and sessions on 3 different linux and sun machines with under couple different accounts.

It's inSANE.