The Modernization of Emacs

D

David Kastrup

Twisted said:
On the other hand, being actively beginner-hostile leads to nobody
adopting the tool. Then again, if you don't mind being the last
generation that'll ever use it, then I guess you're okay with
that. If it suits its existing users, the rest of us will just
continue to use something else.

I continue to suspect that there's an ulterior motive for making and
keeping certain software actively beginner-hostile; a certain macho
elitism also seen with light aircraft pilots and commented on at
www.asktog.com (exact URL escapes me; sorry).

You are babbling.

Emacs is amazingly beginner-friendly for the power and flexibility it
provides. You can sit a beginner at an Emacs session and have him
start editing and learning. You can't do the same, say, with vi or a
clone: the least you need is a vi helpsheet/cheat cup. With Emacs,
the help sheet is helpful but optional (most people would be eyed
strangely anyway if they kept a cheat barrel around at their
workplace).
 
T

Twisted

You are babbling.

No, I am not. You, however, are being gratuitously insulting.
Emacs is amazingly beginner-friendly for the power and flexibility it
provides. [snip]

That's a joke, right? I tried it a time or two. Every time it was
rapidly apparent that doing anything non-trivial would require
consulting a cheat sheet. The printed-out kind, since navigating to
the help and back without already having the help displayed and open
to the command reference was also non-trivial.

Four hours of wasted time later, with zero productivity to show for
it, I deleted it. The same thing happened again, so it wasn't a bad
day or a fluke or a one-off or the particular version, either.
 
K

Kaldrenon

You are babbling.

No, I am not. You, however, are being gratuitously insulting.
Emacs is amazingly beginner-friendly for the power and flexibility it
provides. [snip]

That's a joke, right? I tried it a time or two. Every time it was
rapidly apparent that doing anything non-trivial would require
consulting a cheat sheet. The printed-out kind, since navigating to
the help and back without already having the help displayed and open
to the command reference was also non-trivial.

Four hours of wasted time later, with zero productivity to show for
it, I deleted it. The same thing happened again, so it wasn't a bad
day or a fluke or a one-off or the particular version, either.

I agree with you in that emacs is not inherently nor universally
beginner friendly. However, if you are trying to make the claim that
it is impossible to pick it up quickly, then I no longer agree with
you.

I still have a good deal to learn, even of the basics, but I've toyed
with it casually for a little bit (a total of two hours at most, but
almost certainly less) and I already know enough that finding out how
to do anything else IS trivial. It's not a program whose controls
throw themselves at you, exactly, but with a touch of patience and a
genuine interest in learning, it's not too bad.
 
M

Matthias Buelow

Twisted said:
That's a joke, right? I tried it a time or two. Every time it was
rapidly apparent that doing anything non-trivial would require
consulting a cheat sheet. The printed-out kind, since navigating to
the help and back without already having the help displayed and open
to the command reference was also non-trivial.

Ah, yes.. we live in a time where no-one seems to have the patience to
read documentation anymore. Maybe that's why there is such a scarcity of
good documentation with many "modern" software packages.

Here's a nice one from Ken Thompson:

``I abhor a system designed for the "user", if that word is a coded
pejorative meaning "stupid and unsophisticated".''
 
T

Twisted

I still have a good deal to learn, even of the basics, but I've toyed
with it casually for a little bit (a total of two hours at most, but
almost certainly less) and I already know enough that finding out how
to do anything else IS trivial. It's not a program whose controls
throw themselves at you, exactly, but with a touch of patience and a
genuine interest in learning, it's not too bad.

I don't know what software you're describing, but it's obviously not
emacs, unless there have been some HUGE changes to (at minimum) the
help and pane-navigation (er, excuse me, "window"-navigation)
controls...

My experiences (with emacs and with a lot of other supposedly-
superior, usually unix-heritage software) put me in mind of an
analogy: fumbling around in a strange house in the dark without a
flashlight, banging into furniture frequently, trying to find a light
switch, but it turns out the switches are all spring-loaded. For some
reason (saving electricity and fighting the war against global
warming?) if you go to start doing anything else the light goes off
again immediately -- so you have to stand there holding the switch,
memorize the contents of the room, and then quickly do whatever you
needed to do before your memory of the room's layout and where things
are fades! Then back to the switch, or trip and fumble your way to a
different room's switch...wash, rinse, repeat...

Nobody would actually design a home (or a workplace) like that in a
trillion years, global warming be damned. So why do people still
sometimes design software like that?

Oh and did I mention that these houses' layouts are also totally
strange, with the living room on the top floor and the kitchen in the
basement, or other things of that nature, so you can't transfer any
knowledge of conventional home designs to aid in your navigation
there...and they are even all different from one another, nevermind
"normal" houses...

BTW, is anyone else finding Google Groups especially ornery of late? I
get all of the following, recurrently:

* I enter one reply in a thread, and it works. Then I go to make a
second reply, and I get a text box like one uses to enter a reply,
except evidently read-only -- I can select text but there is no
blinking cursor.
* The fix seems to be to navigate off the page and back.
Unfortunately, that then pops up some dialog. I think GG is trying to
protect me from losing unsaved changes, except that there are
obviously no unsaved changes to the (read-only!) form for me to lose!
* The "back" button is wonky -- it seems to require hitting back
*twice* to go back *one* page to the previous page of the thread or to
the newsgroup's thread index, if already on the first (or only) page.
* After *that*, "forward" behaves sometimes normally and sometimes as
"forward and then click a reply link on some random post"??
* Submitting a post results in the form disappearing and being
replaced by "The post was entered successfully". Of course, if it
turns out to have NOT been all that successful as evidenced from
refreshing the page or using an external newsserver (I have found one
read-only one suitable for verifying that a posting succeeded and
propagated beyond GG's server), there's no way to get back to the form
to try to resubmit the text, or even to recover it to the clipboard to
paste into a fresh form for a fresh attempt. So far, it's never
actually lied and claimed a posting was successful that wasn't, but
there's a first time for everything, and we all know the track record
for QA in the software industry ... and the way one of the more common
failure modes of software is silent failure, claiming success on
failure, claiming failure on success, or claiming one failure when a
different failure happened! (All the various forms of diagnostics
failure...) I guess I have to pre-emptively copy the form contents to
the clipboard before clicking submit, and preserve the clipboard
contents pending verification, or risk catastrophic data loss, because
GG can't be arsed to make a decent interface, or even to leave well
enough alone and stop constantly changing it.
 
T

Twisted

Utterly unrelated to Emacs.

I think it is quite relevant. Clunky computer interfaces may not be so
dramatically dangerous, but they certainly can hamper productivity.
Between Windows bugs and gratuitous misfeatures (e.g. DRM) and Unix
clunkiness, billions of dollars of potential productivity is lost
worldwide every *month*.
 
D

David Kastrup

Twisted said:
I think it is quite relevant. Clunky computer interfaces may not be
so dramatically dangerous, but they certainly can hamper
productivity.

But Emacs does not have a "clunky" interface.
Between Windows bugs and gratuitous misfeatures (e.g. DRM) and Unix
clunkiness, billions of dollars of potential productivity is lost
worldwide every *month*.

You are spewing again.
 
T

Twisted

Ah, yes.. we live in a time where no-one seems to have the patience to
read documentation anymore. Maybe that's why there is such a scarcity of
good documentation with many "modern" software packages.

Emacs does have documentation. The problem is you have to already know
a load of emacs navigation oddities^Wkeyboard commands to get to and
use it.

Also, basic tasks should not require consulting the documentation,
unless the application genre is new to the user. Basic tasks requiring
the uninitiated to consult the documentation is okay in 3D modeling
apps, given the "uninitiated" have used none before. Basic tasks
requiring the uninitiated to consult the documentation is absolutely
ludicrous in a text editor.

I count "consulting the documentation" as one of those basic tasks,
along with the fundamental editing, saving, loading, and searching
functionality (including, of course, "searching the documentation").
``I abhor a system designed for the "user", if that word is a coded
pejorative meaning "stupid and unsophisticated".''

Yeah, and I abhor the elitist systems that are designed with the
philosophy that anyone who hasn't mastered years of arcane
memorization and training in just that one idiosyncratic system is /
ipso facto/ "stupid and unsophisticated". Most of us 6 and a half
billion people have better uses for our time, such as buckling in and
being promptly productive, once we're out of high school or college,
and fully three and a quarter of us are at least as smart as average,
and so /ipso facto/ *not* "stupid and unsophisticated".
 
D

David Kastrup

Twisted said:
I don't know what software you're describing, but it's obviously not
emacs, unless there have been some HUGE changes to (at minimum) the
help and pane-navigation (er, excuse me, "window"-navigation)
controls...

So what version are you babbling about?
 
T

Twisted

But Emacs does not have a "clunky" interface.

That's for the everyday novice-to-intermediate user to decide. Your
gnu.org email address (and attitude) clearly marks you as not a normal
user, and so your opinion doesn't count.
 
D

David Kastrup

Twisted said:
Emacs does have documentation. The problem is you have to already
know a load of emacs navigation oddities^Wkeyboard commands to get
to and use it.

Menus and toolbars exist.
Also, basic tasks should not require consulting the documentation,
unless the application genre is new to the user.

And they don't.

Really, what is the last version of Emacs you actually tried?
 
D

David Kastrup

Twisted said:
That's for the everyday novice-to-intermediate user to decide.

And they do.
Your gnu.org email address (and attitude) clearly marks you as not a
normal user, and so your opinion doesn't count.

Your email address and attitude marks you as an anonymous troll.
 
M

Matthias Buelow

Twisted said:
Emacs does have documentation. The problem is you have to already know
a load of emacs navigation oddities^Wkeyboard commands to get to and
use it.

Yes, like hitting the F1 key.
Yeah, and I abhor the elitist systems that are designed with the
philosophy that anyone who hasn't mastered years of arcane
memorization and training in just that one idiosyncratic system is /
ipso facto/ "stupid and unsophisticated". Most of us 6 and a half
billion people have better uses for our time, such as buckling in and
being promptly productive, once we're out of high school or college,
and fully three and a quarter of us are at least as smart as average,
and so /ipso facto/ *not* "stupid and unsophisticated".

Noone forces you to use either Unix or emacs (or vi, for that matter).
I don't really understand what your problem is.
 
K

Ken Goldman

Twisted said:
Emacs is amazingly beginner-friendly for the power and flexibility it
provides. [snip]


That's a joke, right? I tried it a time or two. Every time it was
rapidly apparent that doing anything non-trivial would require
consulting a cheat sheet.

My son was using emacs at about age 6. Cursor keys work, entering text
works, he had to learn C-x C-s to save a file and C-s to search. That's
as much as most editors can ever do.

And the emacs "do as you read" tutorial is very effective when read.
 

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