Lyx

Posted by Graham Smith
Jan 6, 2007 at 12:09 AM

Derek

>I look forward to
>hearing more about Emacs. Have you looked at the Vim text editor? There are versions
>for Windows, see: http://www.vim.org/about.php

I will stick with Emacs because it also works as a front end for R (with an add-on)

>There is also an outliner add-on for Vim, I believe.

As there is for Emacs, which also has time management tools, and a tutorial on using it for GTD. there is also a wiki type inofmation management- web publishing add-in, and a bibliographic add-in, Latex, address book, and other planning tools,plus others I haven’t found

>Needless to say Vim has a similar reputation to that of Emacs for
>difficulty, but as I have never user either of them I’m not sure to what extent this is
>geek hype and mystification…

It isn’t easy, configuration is manually by typing into a config file in a home directory you need to set up rather than a nice dialog box, but as there are lots of very clever emac people out there it means you can do some really clever customisations of how emacs works. Getting it to print was fun and games and even now I can only get black and white printing.

Its heavily into key strokes so a lot of initial remembering, but this also means that once learnt, it is very very fast to use.

Menu items and functions change with the context of the file loaded, So if you have a Jabref bibliography (which I am now using) and you want to quickly look something up, you can type “Alt-x bib” and it will open the bibliography data base inside Emacs as a properly formatted bibliographic data base that you can search and edit. “Alt-x tasks” will then open your outline based task list, “alt-x wiki” will open your wiki based information store. etc, and you can do the same thing with an address book, mail client, newsgroup client and even web browser, plus many other things I haven’t grasped. There seems to be a tool called remember, that looks at what you are writing and searches all your existing text based files, and pops up reminders of anything it finds that seems relevant to what you are writing about. Of course you need to set this up in the config file, but it isn’t that difficult.

Working with text is great as there are lots of good navigational key stokes to whiz around your doc and clever keystrokes to transpose letters, words and lines. Its also dead easy to add tables with calculated fields, albeit not very pretty tables.

I certainly now understand why people say they can spend all day working on their computer and never leave emacs.

It still a bit geeky, and you do need to put a lot of work into it. but Lyx and Emacs are the first two programs I have come across for years that have inspired me into thinking the effort is really worth it.

You do have to feel happy with the text only interface of course.

Graham