use of emacs worth it

[Frank E. Ritter]

now that I've got R installed here I'm reading these more.

If you are going to use computers for more than an hour a day for 
more than, say, 2 months, you should learn emacs.  If you use 
computers professionally where you program, you really should learn 
emacs.  If you edit data files or program in R,splus, c, or lisp, it 
pays off fairly quickly.

If you experience negative transfer, what's going on is that you are 
noticing things are not as fast as you would like.  In the psychology 
research literature it is very hard to find true negative transfer. 
Not perfect transfer feels negative.  For exmaple, I assure you that 
the slow down I experienced in driving on the wrong  (left) side of 
the road could be seen as negative transfer, but in reality, I was 
driving far faster than a novice driver.  So your first day(s) with 
emacs will have vast speedups, and those speedups will not feel in a 
way commensurate with your actual productivity.

Cheers,

Frank

At 8:27 PM -0500 4/2/01, david.beede at mail.doc.gov wrote:
>Thanks to Frank, Rich, Michele, and Tony for helping me so quickly on my
>.emacs question.  It works!
>
>Now that I am confronted with learning emacs as well as R, I have to
>confess that some doubt is creeping in.  Since I mainly work on a Windows
>98 platform, is it definitely worth using emacs, i.e., will I benefit
>enought from using R in emacs but using emacs for other text-editing that
>it will outweigh the cost of learning how to use emacs?  Sorry if this is
>an old, boring question...
>
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-- 

Frank  Ritter at ist.psu.edu
School of Information Sciences and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University
512 Rider
University Park, PA  16801-3857
ph.  (814) 865-4453   fax (814) 865-5604
http://ritter.ist.psu.edu
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