On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 10:13 AM Larry McVoy <
lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
So many smart people I know love emacs.
ditto.
I... I think it's the lisp aspect, if you don't love lisp, I don't think you'll love emacs.
You might have a hit on something here. I learn TECO and then, as Lars pointed out, FINE on the PDP-10s before I saw UNIX. At the same time, I had been introduced to LISP in our comparative languages course (I wrote a mancala game, and Alpha/Beta solved using it).
But I was never a LISP hacker on the PDP-10s. We primarily used SAIL and BLISS, so I suspect that's why, when I finally had the chance to switch to UNIX and learned EX, I decided it was too much trouble. There were just too many commands and weird sequences to learn again; I wasn't as good with it, so I gave up.
I also suspect that since >>UCB<< original version of ex/vi was ubiquitous (and had been ported to PCs and eventually TOPS-20 but my PDP-10/20 days were long gone). The fact was that Emacs was not in those days (yes, there were lots of flavors, but each was different for the pc's, but it was not on other UNIX systems for a while), so that may have tainted my thinking. But when it did show up, Gosling EMACS (which begat Gnu) != Zimmerman Emacs [similar to the nvi/cim war of today].
However, I suspect that if I had grown up in the Lisp world, the comfort of having that would have been a strong drive to want it everywhere. But without that, the (re)learning curve was just too high and I >>was<< comfortable. It got the job done.
BTW, I feel the same way about troff and LaTeX. I gave up Scribe from the PDP-10s/20s when I went to UNIX. The tool I had was nroff/troff. I became very proficient with it - better than I had ever been with Scribe. Scribe became unobtainium and Tex became the standard in PDP-10 and VMS land. Then folks tried to import a lot of Scribe into Tex, creating Latex, but by the time I had access to it, it was just too different; it was not worth the effort.