Editing is one task that can benefit tremendously from the availability of a windowing system, enhancing the ability to work with more than one document at a time, adding support for menus, mouse-clicks to reposition the cursor, scroll bars, etc.

If you have not already done so, try launching emacs from within an xterm. Notice that it pops up in a separate window. Compare this look (Figure 10: emacs running under X) to emacs when run under telnet (Figure 11: emacs running under telnet). Note that you now have functioning menus and scroll bars. You may see new use of color. A little experimentation will show that you can, indeed, reposition the cursor with a simple mouse click, and you may find that your PageUp, PageDown and other special keys now behave in an intuitive manner.

Many people who dislke emacs complain about having to learn a large number of keyboard command sequences to get things done, like moving the cursor, scrolling the text, etc. What you should be able to see, now, is that such key sequences are only necessary for relatively uncommon actions, or if you are not running in a windowed environment. After all, if you are running in telnet, how can you expect a mouse click to do anything? telnet is an exclusively text-oriented connection. In fact, emacs senses whether or not you are running in a windowing system, and takes advantage of it if you are, but leaves you with the key sequences as a backup mode when working under more primitive conditions.

emacs is certainly not the only available editor under X. You might want to also check out xedit, a simple text editor available on most Unix systems.