"The right way to do anything, is to do it with emacs."

Here's a summary of what I've learned and tried and some of the
exciting consequences.

The main idea, but by no means the only one, is to use emacs' "telnet"
command which telnets from a "telnet" buffer. For those unfamiliar
with emacs buffers are what "hold things" in emacs; in particular, you
can "edit several files at once" by having different files in
different buffers, jumping between them; buffers can also hold other
things, such as directories (which emacs can "edit" as well as files),
help information, etc.

Now you can log on to PeaceNet from this *telnet* buffer as you would
do normally. Actually, I've defined a command "pn" which calls emacs'
telnet function and opens a telnet buffer at "igc.org 6002" getting
you to the "login: (? for help):" point. So you log on to PeaceNet.

But you are still in emacs, secretly, which, not to sound overly
hyperbolic, basically means you can do anything and everything.
anything else.

Let's start with a very simple example of a consequence of this. While
you are logged onto PeaceNet, you are in emacs; you're in one of the
emacs buffers (which you may as well think of as "windows" only they
are one behind another instead of next to each other (emacs can
actually display several at once by splitting the screen), and can
actually run with Window Managers (about which I don't know much)).

In particular, normal emacs commands inside buffers work. Thus if you
are reading a PeaceNet article, you can use emacs's forward or reverse
search feature (in fact, the better "incremental-search") to find
words or strings you are interested in. Emacs can do other things like
counting lines/characters/occurences, sorting, reformatting,
justifying, spellchecking (incl. suggesting corrections), etc.

More to the point, you can cut and paste between emacs buffers and
files. So you can copy the PeaceNet article you are reading and go to
another buffer and paste it there, or save it in a file in your home
directory, with honestly a few keystrokes and near instanteneity.

But wait. You can also send email from emacs, so you can email anyone
the article you were just reading. In particular, you can email it to
ACTIV-L.

Now if only we had a full and recent version of emacs with "gnus" or
"gnews" we could be reading newsgroups and posting in another buffer.
But fortunately as I recently remarked to some of you, there's a way
of posting to newsgroups using ordinary email.

So with the PeaceNet article ready to be pasted (residing in a part,
the most recent "block" of the "kill ring"), we jump with two
keystrokes to the "*mail*" buffer, paste the PeaceNet article in one
keystroke, and then just address it to ACTIV-L, or some people, or
some newsgroups, and then email it out.

Now, emacs has "keyboard macros" one can very easily define (in fact,
you merely "show" emacs what you want the macro to be by performing
the routine as you would ordinarily do so yourself; emacs then writes
the code for the macro in Emacs-Lisp, to be deposited in your .emacs
file so emacs knows the new command you've just defined).

So from PeaceNet -- let's say we are in (c)onferences, having
(c)aptured -- one can run a macro to do the following as soon as
you've finished reading the article: that two-keystroke sequence marks
exactly what subset of the *telnet* buffer the last read article is,
copies it, opens a *mail* buffer, pastes in the PeaceNet article,
reformats all the paragraphs, centers and delimits the header
information, puts the PeaceNet article subject in the Subject line,
puts the "brought to you by ACTIV-L" and "PeaceNet forward"
information where they belong, etc, etc, going on to automatically
address the email to a certain group of people or certain group of
UseNet newsgroups (depending on which macro you ran), leaving it to
you to press control-C twice in a row to send it out (which would
return you to the *telnet* buffer (i.e. to PeaceNet).

I'm no programmer, but I've written simple macros to do more or less
just that.

So we have an automated way, while we read articles etc in PeaceNet,
to send out these articles to mailing lists, friends, UseNet groups,
etc.

In fact, given a week I could write some sort of primitive "readnews"
type setup from emacs which would -- using "(v)isit and (unread) say
-- get all the articles you wanted (including only a subset thereof by
searching for keywords) and post all of them, to the appropriate
newsgroups, and, after (in capture mode) printing them out too quickly
to read, log out of PeaceNet and save them time and you money, and
display them to you in a primitive unix "readnews" format (based on
emacs's "view-buffer" mode, say, since you can easily redefine keys in
emacs... and if I did this 99% of the credit would be with emacs
(mainly Richard Stallman) since this is all easy to do with emacs.

Now a real emacs guru (or even semi-guru) could write the code to give
any PeaceNet subscriber who logs in thru the Internet a "Gnews" type
news reader (which I haven't seen but if it's as nice as everything
else in emacs it would put unix's "rn" to (at least some) shame, and
of course "rn" is fairly nice and puts the normal PeaceNet display to
big shame) with which to read news.

Significantly tell machine-time for PeaceNet. Significantly cheaper
for the Internet-based PeaceNet subscriber. Very significantly nicer
and far more powerful emacs-based "PeaceNet" -- "Gnu-PeaceNet" for the
subscriber --

-- all in the same emacs set up I just described, where you can have a
beautiful GNU-PeaceNet in one buffer, read your email in another
buffer, send mail in another buffer, post in another buffer, read the
on-line emacs manual in anther, get spelling corrections,
directory-editing (renaming, moving, deleting, (un)compressing files,
etc), and so on.

I haven't mentioned many other nice features of emacs (e.g.
auto-saving, clock, calendar, tab<-->space conversion, changing cASe,
and the wonderful "filling" feature). Emacs is limitless in some
sense since a lisp programmer can modify it, expand it, customize it
further and more nicely than I can with the features I described, etc.

Oh, one nice thing I forgot to mention is that GNU Emacs, plus their
programming languages and debuggers etc, are all free.

Even if the somewhat anarchist Free Software Foundation isn't exactly
a group of Progressives/Radicals/Leftists/PeaceNiks, they are a heck
of a lot better than a Corporate entity, and with everything free to
boot (in fact, there is doubtless a nonempty intersection between the
set of "peace"/"progressive" PeaceNet/ACTIV-L folks and the Free
Software Foundation people. In any case, as I suggested to Rich and
Gary a while back,there is great potential for a symbiotic
relationship between PeaceNet and the FSF. I also noted that emacs'
abilities to read/send email, read/send news, etc, handle in one nice
package the (m)ail, (c)onferences, (h)elp, etc features on PeaceNet;
this is now seen to be realizable (and in a "primitive" (still quite
powerful) form already existing) for anyone running emacs and
telnetting.

And, due to the brilliant design of emacs, even before any such
grander things are realized, there can already today be great benefit
from emacs (and GNU in general) as demonstrated by what I've
accomplished in just one and a half days since investigating "telnet"
from emacs (again, with me not even remotely a programmer person, and
with almost all the credit to emacs).

While Gary and Rich are setting up a bidirectional link between Rich
machine and PeaceNet, to handle the transfers for the new newsgroup,
already what a neophyte like myself has written is the way to do
anything outside that setup, including anything you'd do manually or
separately. What any Real (TM) Emacs Guru, could set up would be
capable of not only that function but the "Gnu-PeaceNet" set-up for
all Internet PeaceNet subscribers, combining the (m)ail, (c)onference
(h)elp (u)sers etc features on PeaceNet, going from a very primitive
(PeaceNet) editor (or set of editing functions) to a most powerful
editor, etc, for one thing; and allowing for everything I mentioned in
this letter -- from the third main paragraph down -- and much more.