How did you get started with Emacs?

I started using Emacs as a freshman in college (around October 1997, which means right now is the start of my 8th year Emacsing. whoa.). At first, just for programming. Started using Gnus for reading Usenet news that winter, but didn’t switch to using it for mail until 1999 or so.

What’s the craziest thing you use Emacs to do?

I’m giving a presentation at TagCamp this weekend, and (with the exception of shelling out to HTML Tidy) all of the code is in Emacs Lisp. Code to hit several web APIs, code to dig into html documents to find rel="tag" links, number crunching, etc.

[Here are the slides, BTW.]

What’s one thing you wish your Emacs could do?

I wish I could M-g in Gnus and not have to wait for it to complete. (I run everything (ERC, Gnus, etc.) in a single instance of Emacs, which is occasionally painful due to the whole no-threading thing.) Arguably, I should just use multiple Emacs instances, but (alas) Carbon Emacs can only run one graphical instance at a time. :(