A very, very newbie question :)

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Roy Smith <roy at popmail.med.nyu.edu> wrote:

> jonadab at bright.net (Jonadab the Unsightly One) wrote:
> > In brief, to use Emacs really effectively you need to take
> > the time to learn lisp, but once you do it can literally do
> > anything.
> 
> That's absurd.  I've been using emacs for about 15 years now, and while I do 
> also know lisp, I've never once done anything with lisp and emacs more 
> sophisticated than taking some lisp snippet and cutting-and-pasting it into my 
> emacs startup file.

The *other* option is to leave things functioning more-or-less
they way they come out of the box, which means a MUCH higher
learning curve than if you learn lisp and change them.

Yes, there's customize, but it can only make simple changes.

I have to keep a backup of my site-lisp directory, because
if I were to ever lose it Emacs would become unusable.  Any
time I make changes to .emacs I put them inside a condition-case,
because otherwise if they generate an error I have to fire up
a different text editor to back out my changes, because 
without the customisations in my .emacs file I really can't
use Emacs.  

- jonadab