T
Twisted
Read my other post, twit:
Of course I wouldn't need to follow this thread at all if people would
quit attacking me in it thereby forcing me to defend myself!
Read my other post, twit:
Of course I wouldn't need to follow this thread at all if people would
quit attacking me in it thereby forcing me to defend myself!
D
David Kastrup
Twisted said:
As opposed to your brain, Emacs has not undergone fossilization 10
years ago. While a newsgroup discussing your dim recollections of
Emacs would indeed be boring (apart from the amusement value of your
pomposity), a newsgroup discussing current (and evolving) versions and
use of Emacs has its place. And anyway, the language C has changed
much less in the last 10 years than Emacs has, and you'll still find
active discussion groups for that, too: it is still very much in use,
like Emacs.
As a note aside, you'd be hard put to find an editor that manages a
similar multitude of encodings as well as Emacs does. While it is to
be expected that in the long term utf-8-encoded Unicode is the way of
the future (and Emacs is going to focus more on that in future
versions, too), at the moment there are few editors which keep up with
the existing multitude of multibyte encodings as well as Emacs does.
Emacs also makes it fairly easy to input stuff without much hassle, so
you can easily write things like á¼Î½ á¼€Ïχῇ ἦν ὠλόγος or каша гречневаÑ.
So even if you don't like the user interface of Emacs from 10 years
ago and delight in assuming that it did not change in all that time,
there would be valid reasons for using it nevertheless.
T
Twisted
I'm not the one trying to post my responses there. YOU are the one
trying to post my responses there. You did it again with this one.
Since you seem to WANT my responses there, I'll make sure they still
go there. AND to where I can read them, and any responses to them.
It is common courtesy not to insult people behind their backs (or at
all, really). Trying to "move" this "discussion" away from where I can
even see what you're saying about me looks a lot like an attempt to do
exactly those uncourteous things just described, unless instead it's
an attempt to force me to subscribe to a newsgroup I'm not interested
in. I will resist, no matter which it is that you are trying to
achieve, simply because you are the enemy and therefore must be
resisted and never acquiesced to in even the littlest thing. You
became an enemy when you became virulently hostile and began trying to
smear me in public. You might stop being an enemy someday if you shut
up for a very, very long time about me, never mentioning me nor
otherwise acknowledging my existence. Until then I won't do what you
want. And don't think reverse psychology will work on me either. I
will compute your motives and determine which you'd actually prefer me
to do and do the opposite any time you try to make me do anything at
all, or tell me to do something, or tell me not to do something. And I
will continue to do the opposite to anything you seem to want me to do
for as long as you continue to behave in an adversarial fashion
towards me.
L
Lew
Twisted wrote:
Actually, I meant nothing at all backhanded with the compliments. You really
have made many knowledgeable and helpful posts. While I do not agree with
many of your conclusions in this particular thread, nor all in others, you
have significantly contributed in ways that I respect.
I don't expect my respect or agreement to mean anything magical or important
beyond what I may have earned; I am but one person in a huge universe, but
what I speak is my thought and if I compliment then it is sincerely offered.
Lew said:
Actually, I meant nothing at all backhanded with the compliments. You really
have made many knowledgeable and helpful posts. While I do not agree with
many of your conclusions in this particular thread, nor all in others, you
have significantly contributed in ways that I respect.
I don't expect my respect or agreement to mean anything magical or important
beyond what I may have earned; I am but one person in a huge universe, but
what I speak is my thought and if I compliment then it is sincerely offered.
D
David Kastrup
Twisted said:
You _are_ posting on comp.emacs. If that is not your purpose, you are
merely incompetent. Just stop posting there, and you won't get
replies from there, and with followups directed there.
I am not posting any of your responses.
You are confusing comp.lang.java.programmer with your personal mail
account. It is not the purpose of that group to keep you informed
about discussions elsewhere with a different topic.
Which is why I restrict merely followups to the relevant group. You
should do the same if you want to keep the discussion on
comp.lang.java.programmer, for whatever reason: use a followup-to
header there, and just there. Then people will know that you don't
read elsewhere and can choose to either talk there with you, or save
themselves an answer altogether.
I certainly would not feel qualified to presume knowing what treatment
could be effective in a case like yours. I'll leave that to the
professionals.
Thanks for a good laugh.
A
Adriano Varoli Piazza
Twisted wrote:
[...]
Look, moron, instead of further making an ass of yourself on several
newsgroups, try to follow the advice that has repeatedly been offered,
and learn what a followup header is, what does it mean, and how to set
it in your favorite newsreader. If you are using google groups, it is
quite easy.
We aren't trying to hijack your posts, o almighty one: this whole
conversation was initially spread to several newsgroups and, being
less and less appropriate, we've tried time and again to set the
followups to the on topic places. You've been told this already, as
well as having received tons of advice on comp.emacs (go figure, the
very ng you refuse to use in a _discussion_about_emacs_ has offered
you advice). You are well past the barrier of ridicule, don't worry:
nothing one of us can say will surpass what you've done to yourself on
your own.
That you are evidently ignorant of netiquette and the proper usage of
usenet has only helped in your ridicule. Your paranoia is also fun to
watch, though the insults weren't.
[...]
Look, moron, instead of further making an ass of yourself on several
newsgroups, try to follow the advice that has repeatedly been offered,
and learn what a followup header is, what does it mean, and how to set
it in your favorite newsreader. If you are using google groups, it is
quite easy.
We aren't trying to hijack your posts, o almighty one: this whole
conversation was initially spread to several newsgroups and, being
less and less appropriate, we've tried time and again to set the
followups to the on topic places. You've been told this already, as
well as having received tons of advice on comp.emacs (go figure, the
very ng you refuse to use in a _discussion_about_emacs_ has offered
you advice). You are well past the barrier of ridicule, don't worry:
nothing one of us can say will surpass what you've done to yourself on
your own.
That you are evidently ignorant of netiquette and the proper usage of
usenet has only helped in your ridicule. Your paranoia is also fun to
watch, though the insults weren't.
T
Twisted
The emacs you've sometimes described isn't merely "changed"; it isn't
even emacs any more, given that it apparently resembles it less than
Notepad does.
As for C, it's just as crufty and obsolescent (for any purpose except
implementing an OS kernel, device drivers, and a JVM anyway, and I'm
not sure those wouldn't be better accomplished in Eiffel).
Now this I find frankly unbelievable. Even if you CAN insert stuff
like that, in a non-GUI app you'd be doing it blind, except for the
one language the terminal (emulation) is designed for, say English.
You need a WYSIWYG app (in other words, the anti-Emacs) to do the kind
of thing you're describing and be able to see what the hell you just
typed. Of course, it seems some people are still in love with non-
WYSIWYG guessing games: I see some squares and question marks and
asterisks, but I *think* if I hit "print" I'll get a nice fancy
document in Russian. Now to risk wasting a fortune in ink and paper
finding out if I'm wrong ... eh, what was the print command again? ...
damn, where did I leave that cheat sheet?!
N
nebulous99
Okay. Thank you.
N
nebulous99
But you're trying to hijack them to comp.emacs. You did it yet again
-- if I had not manually intervened THIS response would have gone
there instead of in the newsgroup that I am reading. Since you seem to
want them to go there I'm again sending the ones you try to hijack
exclusively to comp.lang.java.programmer.
And since the normal behavior of a surfer is to read something, click
reply, type their new text, and click send without bothering to verify
that it will actually go to the newsgroup they are reading since
that's normally automatic, you are in effect choosing the destination
of their post for them when you do whatever it is you keep doing. That
strikes me as quite rude. How many people respond to postings of
yours, then later come back to see if there's been any response to
their response, only to end up scratching their heads because the
response they distinctly remember writing is nowhere to be seen?
If this discussion is off-topic for cljp, we have Xah to blame for
that. He's the one that started this thread and included cljp in the
newsgroups line. Now it has to continue in cljp if people who started
reading it in cljp and ended up with a stake in it are to continue to
follow it without gratuitously subscribing to extra newsgroups they
don't have the time or inclination to read.
This must be some subtle and arguably-clever insult. My response is a
bit more direct, and therefore is more honest: FOAD, and have a nice
day.
You might not be so amused when it eventually dawns on you that that
guy that you've been harassing, insulting, and intermittently pissing
off over the Internet over the past few weeks knows your street
address. Not that I plan to use this information for anything but
rattling your cage right here and now, but are you so certain that
*everyone* you're this nasty to online will likewise not use it?
P.S. Will someone PLEASE tell me how to exempt myself from GG's
ridiculously small "posting limits"?!?! I had posted maybe 10 articles
to cljp all day and one to another newsgroup, and apparently that was
enough to exceed their limit. I think it keeps decreasing -- I
remember estimating it as 50 postings in 24 hours, and later it
apparently dropped to 25. Now it looks to be half that again. That
actually makes that aeio or whatever it was called start to look rosy,
with its limit of 25; now that is the HIGHER limit instead of the
LOWER one.
And I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING DEMAND that in the future, if a posting won't
be accepted it say so as soon as I click "reply" instead of waiting
for me to enter a bunch of data that I'll then have to do all over
again after logging out and back in!!! Christ that makes me mad! Who
designed this thing anyway, Microsoft? And why isn't there any working
feedback method to tell the developers of GG this, so I have to post
it here instead and hope they happen to stumble onto it someday???
There was only the one web form that I ever found, which never
produced anything but automated responses and form letters that prove
that whatever I wrote was only ever read by a bot, or at least
something with the IQ of a bot. Plus there's no Google Groups feedback
newsgroup, which is a complete travesty...
By the way, whoever it was that just tried to hack me* (David Kastrup?
Was that you?), you can now go to hell. Please board the ferry at
once. Oh, and we regret to inform you that the WiFi service is
temporarily out of order. -- Styx Cruise Lines Mgt. (So, no more
internet for you.)
* I just got a spontaneous popup saying "The Windows scripting host is
disabled", apparently an error message caused when an attempt to use
the scripting host was foiled by my having long since turned it off as
a security risk. Obviously I was right to do so. Typing in this box in
Firefox shouldn't attempt to invoke the Windows scripting host. Which
suggests an attempt to exploit some scripting vulnerability, either by
code embedded somehow into one of the postings to this thread, or
separately by someone sending packets of would-be doom to my IP
address. In any event, don't bother trying again. There was a similar
attack a few days ago that was equally futile. WHATEVER VULNERABILITY
YOU TRIED TO EXPLOIT IS NOT EXPOSED ON MY COMPUTER -- DON'T BOTHER.
The only thing you accomplished was to a) cause that dialog to pop up,
which is annoying and wastes my time with closing it; b) cause Windows
Help and Support Center to open by itself afterward, probably to try
to assist me with diagnosing my scripting host problem, in typical
brain-dead Windoze fashion (but at least it HAS a Help and Support
Center that is easy to get to, navigate, and use, unlike some software
that I could name); and c) alert me to the hack attempt. Next time
maybe I'll happen to have WireShark running. Then I'll have your IP
and logs evidencing an attempted hack. Then you will want to quake in
terror at losing your net account and maybe getting arrested!
D
David Kastrup
Twisted said:
Uh, it is still the code base copyrighted and released by the Free
Software Foundation, evolved, never exchanged. It certainly resembles
the prehistoric Emacs you apparently have seen decades ago more than
"Microsoft Word" of our times would resemble similarly aged variants
of that piece of software: most old key combinations would still work.
Not exactly trivial exceptions...
Shrug. Since you refuse trying out a current version of Emacs, and
refuse to visit any web site where you could cure your ignorance, it
is not relevant what you find believable or not in your self-inflicted
blindness.
Why am I not surprised that you can't imagine a text terminal
supporting utf-8 or any of the more common Japanese encodings? Just
for fun, I started emacs -nw (which lets it run as a non-GUI app)
inside of a GNOME terminal in an utf-8 environment, and tell you what:
no problems with input and display of Greek and Russian, even though
it explicitly ran as a terminal app.
Which does not change that Emacs nowadays _is_ a GUI app unless you
explicitly tell it not to bother.
For monospaced fonts and fixed linebreaks, an editor _is_ basically
WYSIWYG, at least if you use the same fonts. And even if not, that
does not preclude readability, without requiring any particular
WYSIWYG or GUI features.
Then you are either incompetent or lying since I have no problems
seeing the respective text passages in Firefox on Google Groups
(presumably your newsreader). Since you expressed your unbelief about
Emacs being usable for editing such scripts (which you purport not to
be seeing), and since question marks and asterisks would not actually
be much cause for unbelief, and since you replaced every _complete_
utf-8 character (which consists of several bytes) by a single space
(implying that your newsreader perfectly well recognized the number of
Unicode characters encoded in utf-8) in your message cite, the
evidence points strongly to the latter.
You need a cheat sheet for Firefox? Why would you be using it then?
N
nebulous99
[snip insult; what negative things he claimed about me are false]
At last, the proper form of respect. On the other hand, a complete
lie; the very post claiming "We aren't trying to hijack your posts"
tried to hijack this response out of comp.lang.java.programmer,
presumably so that people there would read the insult directed at me
but my rebuttal of the same insult would disappear into the ether and
go unread by them. And the further insultage in response to the
rebuttal would not even be seen by *me* so I could respond in my own
defense.
[A further volley of insults snipped. They are false; they are to be
ignored.]
At last, the proper form of respect.
On the other hand, a completelie; the very post claiming "We aren't trying to hijack your posts"
tried to hijack this response out of comp.lang.java.programmer,
presumably so that people there would read the insult directed at me
but my rebuttal of the same insult would disappear into the ether and
go unread by them. And the further insultage in response to the
rebuttal would not even be seen by *me* so I could respond in my own
defense.
[A further volley of insults snipped. They are false; they are to be
ignored.]
N
nebulous99
Spoken like a True Believer in the One True Religion trying to convert
an infidel.
Or was that the other One True Religion? Or the other other One True
Religion? I'm sorry, there's too damn many One True Religions out
there, all hugely different, for me to keep track of them properly.
Anyway you sound like one of those Prior guys in Stargate SG-1 droning
on about opening one's eyes to the wonders of Origin. I always enjoy
seeing those guys get it in the butt from a Mark-IX Gatebuster or
souped-up particle-beam weapon or similarly ...
That's frankly impossible. You can't fit the Greek, Russian, and Latin
alphabets into a character set of 256 characters for a text-mode
terminal to display. Not even if you reuse the same index for, say,
capital A and capital alpha, which can reasonably be given the same
glyph, and for the other cases where very similar/identical glyphs may
be coalesced into one. If you ran this thing at an MS-DOS prompt on an
old 386 it could simply not display all of those glyphs concurrently.
You might manage some crufty trick with the vsync and interrupts and
rapidly flipping charset page pointers to fake it, but at the cost of
losing portability and that ineffable quality of "not blowing up
horribly in protected mode".
You can certainly do it on a faux "terminal" that is really a GUI
window in disguise (e.g. a fullscreen DirectX app pretending to be a
console app on Windows), but that's cheating of course...
[snip everything else]
You are confused. I saw the foreign-language text just fine, both in
the "real" newsreader with the read-only public server, and in Google
Groups. It even looked correct quoted in the reply box when composing
my response. GG obviously mangled it when I actually hit Send, which
somehow doesn't surprise me.
The squares, question marks, and asterisks thing was referring to a
hypothetical attempt to use a terminal mode 80x25 text editor to edit
such text. It couldn't show it to you WYSIWYG, without the kind of
dirty interrupt-handling tricks described above anyway, so you're
blindly guessing what will come out of the printer, not to mention
making a document that isn't of much use for online browsing rather
than printing to anyone with only equally primitive software to view
it. There's a panoply of reasons WYSIWYG took off, and this is one of
them.
The only non-WYSIWYG tool I would normally consider using these days
is TeX/LaTeX, because you can logically structure the document and
work directly with the source in a nonproprietary format and get all
the wordprocessing bells and whistles and a nicer looking output than
WinWord or OpenOffice Writer to boot. The price is having to compile
the thing, and having to fairly often compile and preview to test that
things look the way you expect or want, especially with anything ascii
can't express, like math or foreign languages. At least on a modern
system that is easy to do and a faithful WYSIWYG preview (or error
message) can be had on-screen in ten seconds flat anytime you want
one, all without wasting any ink or paper on botched versions. When
you have one that looks perfect in the previewer, then you print it,
or just convert it to pdf for online use and paper-and-ink-savings.
That beats the hell out of "guess and hit print", even if it isn't
quite as nice as the ideal (probably achievable with realistic
hardware requirements RSN) of a continuously-updated preview, or the
ability to edit the WYSIWYG view and resort to editing the code only
on an as-needed basis...
A
Adriano Varoli Piazza
[email protected] said:
This -and the rest of your post- is too much fun. Thank you, you are
too funny. One might think you are doing it on purpose.
Hint: do wiki up UTF-8 before you continue down this new road of
ridiculing yourself. Here, since you brightened up the morning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utf-8
Hint #2: the 256 charset limit is solely your imposition.
OTOH, it's not only Emacs you haven't been in contact with for years.
B
Bent C Dalager
Interestingly, of course, this is exactly why reverse psychology
/will/ have some effect on you
Cheers
Bent D
L
Lew
Adriano said:
It's a standard rhetorical device. Someone presents evidence that contradicts
one's conclusion, e.g., that they entered Greek or Russian or Katakana
characters on their text terminal and it worked fine. This evidence is based
on actual experience. The person whose conclusion is destroyed then asserts
that the evidence is impossible or that the reporter is lying.
There is no benefit to providing evidence in the face of such
close-mindedness. No matter how many facts you present, the respondent will
tell you that it is not possible, or that you are lying, or that you are
"really" talking about a different product (despite it coming from the same
place and codebase), and will continue obstinately to disbelieve, and of
course, will never try it themselves lest they be forced to open a door into
that heavily-guarded fortress they call a mind.
Whether this is honest mental rigidity or merely trollish rhetoric only the
practitioner could know.
T
Twisted
That lets you fit wide characters into ASCII with an encoding. Have
you ever tried to edit raw UTF-8 in an editor that is only aware of
ASCII? It's basically binary code. If you're talking about a UTF-8-
aware editor or viewer of any kind you're talking either a graphical
one or one that can only display a subset of Unicode at a time, one
code page at a time most likely.
No it is not. A text mode display is, pretty much by its very nature,
limited to that. Each of the 80x24 (sometimes 80x25) spaces on the
screen displays one of 256 glyphs from a charset page of memory. One
charset can be used at a time, except that by playing games with
interrupts and timers you may be able to "cheat" to get e.g. one
charset used on the top half of the screen and a different one on the
bottom half. With a large set of charsets you could still display the
full range of Unicode characters, so long as only one code page was
used at a time. So you could edit the Cyrillic document, then switch
to the Greek document, then the English one, and so forth, but not
edit a document with mixed Cyrillic and English -- not and be able to
see both languages properly, instead of one as markup or incorrect
Latin glyphs or something, anyway.
If you can display them side by side at the same time without any
difficulty, it's probably because you're not in text mode at all, but
using a graphical app, and then we're discussing GUI WYSIWYG rather
than text mode and the issue is moot.
(One other trick: using the ACTUAL CHARACTERS USED in what's currently
being displayed to cobble together a new charset on the fly might
allow displaying many languages at once in text mode. Still with only
at most 256 distinct glyphs shown correctly at the same time mind you.
Oh, and by the way, obscure and archaic systems with 9-bit bytes and
therefore 512-character charsets and the like don't count; nobody uses
them anymore.)
T
Twisted
Oh, I quite believe that someone could enter Greek, Russion, OR
Katakana characters on their text terminal.
I also believe that someone could even enter Greek, Russian, AND
Katakana characters on their text terminal. Not all at the same time,
or with two out of the three at minimum typed blind, mind you, and
with all kinds of keyboard gymnastics for at least two of them
besides. (Unplugging one keyboard and plugging in another counts as
gymnastics, as does any hairy alt-meta-shift BS to enter foreign
chars, or simply changing the keyboard encoding driver and typing
blind since the keycaps no longer match what you're actually typing.)
On the other hand, if they get all those languages to display in all
their >256 native glyphs all on one line of the display, either
they're using a custom charset page that mixes some glyphs from each
language, or they're not using a text-mode display at all, but rather
a graphics display, even if only to display text. Basically, if it
won't work without using at least an EGA card in the box, rather than
on say a plain-jane IBM AT, or won't work on a (real, rather than
emulated) VT-100, or some such, then they cheated.
M
Miles Bader
Twisted said:
Er, why don't you just answer his question (what version)? He's asking
for actual information, which will help us understand what you are
(trying) to to say.
If you continue to just make vague and unsupported (and rather hostile)
assertions, without examples, version numbers, or other concrete
information, do you expect anybody will continue listening to you?
-miles
T
Twisted
Some people can't let sleeping dogs lie I guess.
I can't remember the specific version after all these years. It may
have been 18 or 19 point something. As for "concrete information" this
thread is littered with fairly specific anecdotes. I know, I know;
anecdotes aren't really proof of anything. Got any better suggestions?
HCI stuff is a bit slippery to try to hang a rigorous theory and
quantitative facts upon. For most people, a crappy interface isn't
something they can precisely define, but they know it when they see it
(or at least try to use it).
X
Xah Lee
About a month ago, i posted a message about modernization of emacs. I
enlisted several items that i think emacs should adapt.
Today I added another section to the frequestly asked questions.
The new section is pasted below. The full article can be found at
http://xahlee.org/emacs/modernization.html
------------------------------
Q: The Meta key is logical and proper, it shouldn't be renamed to Alt.
A: Most computer geekers think that the so-called "Meta" key of Emacs
is a more general and logical naming, and they believe in Emacs
documentation the term "Meta key" should not be called the "Alt key"
to fit the mundane PC keyboard.
[image]
above: The Space-cadet keyboard (Source , 2007-07) .
Emacs's naming of Meta key isn't actually a general naming scheme. It
is simply the name of a special modifier key on a particular keyboard
popularly used with Emacs in the 1980s. (see Space-cadet keyboard ) On
this keyboard, it has several modifier keys, including Ctrl, Meta,
Super, Hyper. The Emacs's use of the term "Meta key" simply referred
to that key on that keyboard. Emacs actually also support the other
modifier keys Super and Hyper to this day. The Space-cadet keyboard
fell out of use along with Lisp machine . The IBM PC keyboard (and
its decendents) becomes the most popular since the 1990s and is
practically the standard keyboard used today. The IBM PC keyboard does
not have Super and Hyper keys, so Emacs's support for them becomes
little known, but Ctrl remains Ctrl while Meta is mapped to the Alt
key.
In Emacs's documentation, the term Meta key should be replaced with
the Alt key, to reflect current usage, since that is the keyboard 99%
of personal computer users know. The "Meta key" name is a major point
of confusion for getting people to learn Emacs. The abbreviation C-
<key> and M-<key> to represent keyboard shortcuts should similarly be
updated to the more easy-to-understand and universal Ctrl-<key> and
Alt-<key>.
Xah
(e-mail address removed)
http://xahlee.org/
enlisted several items that i think emacs should adapt.
Today I added another section to the frequestly asked questions.
The new section is pasted below. The full article can be found at
http://xahlee.org/emacs/modernization.html
------------------------------
Q: The Meta key is logical and proper, it shouldn't be renamed to Alt.
A: Most computer geekers think that the so-called "Meta" key of Emacs
is a more general and logical naming, and they believe in Emacs
documentation the term "Meta key" should not be called the "Alt key"
to fit the mundane PC keyboard.
[image]
above: The Space-cadet keyboard (Source , 2007-07) .
Emacs's naming of Meta key isn't actually a general naming scheme. It
is simply the name of a special modifier key on a particular keyboard
popularly used with Emacs in the 1980s. (see Space-cadet keyboard ) On
this keyboard, it has several modifier keys, including Ctrl, Meta,
Super, Hyper. The Emacs's use of the term "Meta key" simply referred
to that key on that keyboard. Emacs actually also support the other
modifier keys Super and Hyper to this day. The Space-cadet keyboard
fell out of use along with Lisp machine . The IBM PC keyboard (and
its decendents) becomes the most popular since the 1990s and is
practically the standard keyboard used today. The IBM PC keyboard does
not have Super and Hyper keys, so Emacs's support for them becomes
little known, but Ctrl remains Ctrl while Meta is mapped to the Alt
key.
In Emacs's documentation, the term Meta key should be replaced with
the Alt key, to reflect current usage, since that is the keyboard 99%
of personal computer users know. The "Meta key" name is a major point
of confusion for getting people to learn Emacs. The abbreviation C-
<key> and M-<key> to represent keyboard shortcuts should similarly be
updated to the more easy-to-understand and universal Ctrl-<key> and
Alt-<key>.
Xah
(e-mail address removed)
http://xahlee.org/