[PLUG] what do you use Emacs for?

[David Mandel]

Yes, back in the old days I did many things with emacs.

    As well as the programs Dan mentioned, I wrote large complex key
binding system which contained quite a few custom functions that were
lacking in standard emacs.  This key binding system worked well in it's
day and age; but is no longer of value because of major improvements in emacs.

    I also wrote a number of screen oriented data entry programs using
emacs.  These also worked well.  They were designed to edit complex
ASCII files, where it was important to know what field was where and
if a given input value was reasonable.  In addition, the data entry
program computed certain fields based on other fields as the user
entered them.  This was sort a cool application.  At least, my client
like it.  In particular, the client liked the fact that it was much
much faster to use than the traditional data base forms based screens.
It also gave the client more flexibility to do cutting and pasting
and to ditto fields from one record to the next.  In fact, as I recall
I even had fields that could be dittoed with an increment added to it.

    I recall yet another of my emacs applications.  I used emacs
shell and/or telnet mode to run command line programs - especially
MOSS and ArcInfo.  By doing this I could use emacs lisp to write
macros for MOSS and ArcInfo.  ArcInfo comes with it's own scripting
language, called CPL.  However, emacs lisp is faster and much more
powerful than CPL.  This system worked great; but for some reason
I never convinced many users to adopt it.

    In any case,


           NOW JUST DO THESE THINGS WITH VI MY FRIENDS!!


-  EMACS RULES  -  EMACS RULES  -  EMACS RULES  -  EMACS RULES  -


                                                 Dave Mandel

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Dan Haskell wrote:

>
> On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Carla Schroder wrote:
>
> > I'm curious, given how extensible it is, what do Emacs users do with
> > it, beyond reading email/newsgroups, and editing files?
>
> Dave Mandel is the one to talk with about Emacs. In his days at the BLM,
> he wrote a number of Emacs Lisp scripts to clean-up text based GIS data
> files. I think he may have written some sort of daemom process that used
> Emacs to transfer files between the Novell server and a Prime. At one
> point, He even hooked me into writing Lisp scripts to find problems in
> very large (for the era) DXF files.
>
> Dan
>
>
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>


                                          Sincerely,
                                          David Mandel
                                          Chief Activist
                                          Portland Linux/Unix Group
                                          560 SE Alexander
                                          Corvallis, Oregon 97333
                                          (541) 684-4644 at work
                                          (541) 730-5285 cell

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