Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/2

 Astronomic Institute, and there was a geek there who basically installed the first computers there. There were all Atari computers at the time, so nothing more fancy. He was a fan of MicroEmacs. I don't know if you know MicroEmacs. That's Emacs flavor which Linus Torvalds actually uses, I think, right now. It's not totally unrelated to Emacs, but it has similar standard basic keybindings, and it's a smaller thing.

So that geek in that institute introduced me to MicroEmacs, and I started using it as my editor. It actually also had an extension language. I started writing some macros for it because programming was just fun. I got started programming using pocket calculators and stuff like this. Really, I was actually in a club where we were doing a programming of HP and Texas Instruments calculators.

Sacha: That's awesome.

Carsten: So I started programming some things. I was writing my thesis at that time. So I was writing the thesis in LaTeX, and I started to put some basic LaTeX support into this editor. I also implemented a spellchecker, which was basically just linking through to the Linux, to the Unix spell command below and just checking individual words and doing stuff like this.

That's how I got started. I actually pushed it pretty far. I worked a couple of years on MicroEmacs, but then really hit the limit. The macro language there is kind of nice, but it doesn't really reach farther. If you want to do something more complicated, you will really reach your limit.

So, when I left Berlin, I went for postdoc to America. I started with the real Emacs. I've never looked back. That really taught me, I think, something really basic, because at that time I made the decision that I would never start using an inferior tool. It doesn't really make sense. For example, I didn't use Awk, I used Perl, because I knew that if you try to program something with Awk, you will just hit your head against the wall at some point. Perl is just so open-ended that whatever you want to do, you will be able to do in this language.

Sacha: Yes.

Carsten: I think it's the same is true for Emacs. Basically, just completely unlimited. Whatever you want to do is there.

Okay, then I started using Emacs. I think it was mostly XEmacs at the time, because I think that was in the early 90s. Emacs was kind of a slow-going,