Mohammed Ismail 
What brought you to #Emacs?
For me, it was being able to split a file buffer across windows.
@myTerminal I gave #emacs few hours just to see what the capabilities are. Unfortunately these few hours did not convinced me that #emacs is something which would bring additional values to my existing workflow. It's an interesting project indeed and I'm envious when I see a person "living" in that platform.
@dammn I'm "kinda" that person. 🤓
Dave Braze
Charles Choi 최 민수
tusharhero@myTerminal After trying to make neovim do what org-mode does.
@tusharhero Interesting...
Lucius Chen@myTerminal At first it was because of org-mode, later I used it to chat on Telegram, browse emails, write Python and Java, and send this toot.
Omar Antolín@myTerminal For me it was the slowness of LaTeX syntax highlighting in Vim. I had a cheap netbook (remember those?) I was using to take notes in class, and Vim kept lagging behind my typing (which is not that fast!). This is a well-known problem in Vim and the help files have several suggestions (see :help tex-slow), but none of them worked for me —other than simply turning off syntax highlighting in LaTeX files, which did work. I tried Emacs instead and have never looked back.
Ramin HonaryWhat brought you to #Emacs?
@myTerminal I was using Tmux, Vim, Bash, AWK, and FZF, and I kept trying to write scripts for all of these programs that would allow me more coordination between them. For example, I once wanted to launch a process from Vim in a second terminal in a Tmux split-screen, capture it’s output into a temporary file, then when the process exited, use AWK to select symbols from the file that I could later feed into FZF. Or I would write a little wrapper Bash script that would run a build process and send a notification and trigger Tmux to automatically switch to the shell when the process completed.
I was always thinking to myself how I wished all of these separate tools, which were all doing one just thing and doing it well (the Unix philosophy), could be connected together without needing to use pipes or complicated message passing through temporary files or through DBus. And I also wished they were all written in the same programming language, instead of having a different language for Bash, AWK, VimScript, and the config languages for Tmux, or using long chains of CLI options stored into partial script files.
Then it hit me one day that this thing that I was wishing for, which coordinated between the terminal multiplexer, command shell, editor, and auto-completion framework and was all scripted with just one programming language, this thing already existed and it was called Emacs.
Then I finally understood what all the fuss was about, and switched to Emacs forever.
#tech #software #lisp #Emacs #EmacsLisp #UnixPhilosophy #FreeSoftware #FLOSS #FOSS #CLI #CommandLine
@myTerminal you may be interested in an article I wrote on my blog:
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-fulfills-the-unix-philosophy.html
It goes into detail about many of the facts about Emacs which you mentioned in your “World of Emacs“ document.
Paul SomeoneElseIDLWAVE package to work with $$$ IDL scientific computing and graphing software.
I guess that was my first REPL.
Also rectangle editing.
I guess that was my first REPL.
Also rectangle editing.
superketchup 
@myTerminal #emacs is the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It teaches you things you never knew existed. Evolutionary leap.
2001: A Space Odyssey, black monolith
llewelly@myTerminal transpose and tramp. Duplicating the first always required writing a macro in every other code editor, which would inevitably break when you upgraded. The second was often much harder.
The Grue@myTerminal We covered several programming languages in a special course at university. One of them was #lisp and our professor told us that #emacs would be the easiest way to use it. I use it since then.
M. Grégoire@myTerminal I lurked on Debian mailing lists, and noticed that some of the developers I most respected used Gnus/Emacs to write e-mail. Seemed like it might be worth trying. Then I got into LaTex and Org...
@mpjgregoire That reminds me of a time when (during my early days with #Emacs) I tried to configure my work email and ended up losing a sizeable part of my mailbox, only to silently return back to Outlook. 🤓
@myTerminal I've been tempted to try that, but really I don't dare. There's a standard e-mail format we're supposed to use as well, so probably best not to fiddle around.
@mpjgregoire Later, I had luck with #mew and I did use it for a short while. Now, that I use #Outlook at work and #Thunderbird outside, the only other communication I use from within #Emacs is #IRC, and it's super convenient.
Jonathan Lamothe@myTerminal An oddly specific task. I had a job that required me to write a lot of ugly repetitive code that made me die a little inside whenever I did it. I discovered that I could write some custom elisp that would prompt me for some parameters and have it generate the code for me.
I left that job like two decades ago, but my brain has become to broken by Emacs to use anything else at this point.
@me I was a part of a group that used to jump into various teams in our organization, help solve their problems and deliver their work quicker. We demoed macros a few times to a team of quality analysts that were working on repetitive code and losing their hours trying to refactor files longer than a thousand lines. We showed them that they could save hours everyday, but they sadly never "bought" it. 😛
@myTerminal In my case, it was an embedded web server built into custom control panels. The server could only serve up static text files with certain character combinations substituted for values read from a BMS network. There was no other server-side logic allowed, no functions or control flow of any sort, just straight text substitution. Before I was promoted to the position they were just hand-coding a lot of very similar HTML files.
There was a lot of tedious repetitive nonsense like that in that job, and figuring out some rudimentary elisp to automate it definitely saved my sanity.
Bruce Elrick@myTerminal It was 1991 and I needed to manipulate columns of text data and it had the ability to do rectangular selections, cut, and pasting. As far as I knew/know, vi didn't have that ability at that time. I also didn't know how to used something like awk to do that.
@myTerminal
I was using AIX and only had XLC, the IBM C compiler.
I had to compile GCC 1.?? using XLC. That was interesting. Cool that once it compiled clean you then had it compile itself in a chain until it produced the same executable twice.
I then built the GNU build tools needed to build GNU Emacs. It must have included building elisp?
I also built Perl, LaTeX, gnuplot.
Fun times.
@myTerminal
In retrospect, I'm guessing I built Emacs because I didn't want to learn vi modes. Rectangular cut/paste I probably discovered later.
In retrospect, I'm guessing I built Emacs because I didn't want to learn vi modes. Rectangular cut/paste I probably discovered later.
Jayesh Bhoot@myTerminal I don't remember what got me in, but what has kept me going is the devil-mode – a modifier-key-less approach to Emacs editing.
olinasc@myTerminal I wanted to learn Erlang and the official way of doing it was with Emacs. So I began learning two things at the same time... Not something I'd recommend anyone. Either way it payed back handsomely with time.
zrzz@myTerminal I arrived to #Emacs many years ago and on two intertwining paths.
On the editor side I started out on wordstar-like editors on DOS. Once on Unix/Linux I looked for something similar and discovered joe. Later on found jed which also had a wordstar emulation mode. At some point I accidentally started using jed in its native mode which is Emacs-like. And this eventually brought me to to the real deal.
On the Usenet newsreader side I started out on tin and then discovered slrn (which is related to the above mentioned jed) and arrived to Gnus on Emacs. Gnus was definitely a killer app for me early on.
slrn and jed use an extension language called slang. This gave me a taste of extensibility so when I landed on Emacs I jumped on elisp right away. I remember printing out and reading the Emacs Lisp Intro the which is still a great way to get started. And I was hooked for good from then on.
Josh Kingsley 🍋@myTerminal CIDER originally. Then after a break I came back because I realized I don’t want to spend my time learning and customizing a worse and less powerful editor when I can make Emacs do everything I want
Jack Rusher@myTerminal It was the most interesting environment available for the dumb terminals we had in the CS terminal room… 40 years ago!