Uh oh

I should have played the Adventure in Emacs before I went wildly blogging. It is not the original Adventure, but another one entirely. Oh well, it's still fun to play.

Houston, We Have Zork

Malyon is a Z-code interpreter written in Emacs Elisp. Now, I have an Infocom mode to play Zork, Enchanter, Starcross, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and more. Love is. I have all of the Infocom Z files and a bunch from other interactive fiction authors. I've got some reading and adventuring to do while I continue my Emacs journey. Maybe I'll play a little Stationfall during my next *cough*compile*cough*.

Giggling With Emacs

I started out with AquaEmacs, but quickly switched to Carbon Emacs. The reason was because I still use Windows in other places and it was easier switching between GNU Emacs on Windows and Carbon Emacs on Mac. After my efforts tonight, I have line numbers displaying in the left column thanks to linum.el. I'm finding Emacs Wiki to be a great resource for information. I'm mainly learning by reading other people's code and .emacs files. As with anything, I'm finding lots of things that don't work and performing tons of searches into what certain commands do. Emacs has great help support built-in and is proving to be indispensable in my journey.

But, these are not the reasons for my giggling. I was going through the menus and saw Games under the Tools menu. How quaint. I'm not a big game player. I look at the games listed and see "Adventure". I think to myself, "No way". I click and "XYZZY!" It's the real deal. Oh, I love interactive fiction (Infocom is my fave) and I have never played Adventure. This might keep me busy for a little while. The one kind of game that I love, Emacs has the original built-in. How cool.

Emacs

To see what I have been missing, I have decided to really get into and learn Emacs. So far, I can I configure the modes and know a lot of the basic commands. I have the Erlang, Ruby, Slime, and Javascript modes working. The thing that has made the difference this time has been making Emacs my editor for everything everywhere. There's no way to fall into old habits.

Some might be wondering why am I torturing myself? I want to see and experience what so many developers that I respect love about Emacs. It's a different viewpoint than mine. Everything is viewed as text whereas I view the world as all objects. It's interesting. It's pushing me out my comfort zone of rich IDEs. I'm not going to say that I've been dealing with is better yet. But, I am making an effort in earnest to learn.

Next steps, I would like to start customizing Emacs through ELisp. Should be exciting and fun!