The Modernization of Emacs

T

Twisted

...spewing...babbling...

I won't dignify your insulting twaddle and random ad-hominem verbiage
with any more responses after this one. Something with actual logical
argumentation to rebut may be another matter of course.

One more GG issue: those stupid star ratings. So potentially
prejudicial. So easy to game, as evidenced by your managing to somehow
vote 82 times(!) against one of my posts in a matter of minutes. So
far I've found a less-impressive method to game them -- it's not hard
to get throwaway accounts elsewhere, send yourself there a gmail
invite, and create many GG accounts. Handy to get around their onerous
posting limits. Handy for stuffing the star-vote ballot boxes with
multiple votes, too, but there's no way I can see to generate 82 of
them that fast by that method, and that much logging in and out in
that short a time using different accounts but from just one IP
address is sure to come up on Google's radar somehow, with
unpredictable but probably bad results. How did you do it? I'm
guessing they stop the link for voting appearing as a usable link on
the page for a) your own posts and b) the ones you've voted for, but
the link's URL still works, so if you use a script to keep fetching
the appropriate URL ...
 
C

Cor Gest

Some entity, AKA Twisted <[email protected]>,
wrote this mindboggling stuff:
(selectively-snipped-or-not-p)
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).

Of course! real tools are not for wannabees.
Just like there are a lot of people that have a shed full off the most
modern power-tools that money can buy from the local DIY-Market,
but cannot build a chickencoop if their life depended on it.
If you are to lazy to learn how to use any tool, it will not serve
you in any usefull manner.
But if you are to dumb to grok it, it's useless anyway.

Cor
 
D

Dave Hansen

Actually, the "E" in "Emacs" stands for "extensible". Part of the
appeal of Emacs is that you can change it to accommodate you.

Actually, though Emacs is the epitome of extensibility, the "E" stands
for "Editor." "EMACS" is simply short for Editor MACroS, and was
originally implemented as a set of TECO macros.

There's also the joke that EMACS stands for Esc Meta Alt Ctrl Shift,
due to it's (often overwhelmingly) large and sometimes complex set of
keystroke combinations used to invoke various editing functions. This
view is usually put forth by the vi camp during editor wars.

Speaking of which, vi is a piece of wombat do. ;-)

Regards,

-=Dave
 
D

Daniel Dyer

Actually, though Emacs is the epitome of extensibility, the "E" stands
for "Editor." "EMACS" is simply short for Editor MACroS, and was
originally implemented as a set of TECO macros.

There's also the joke that EMACS stands for Esc Meta Alt Ctrl Shift,
due to it's (often overwhelmingly) large and sometimes complex set of
keystroke combinations used to invoke various editing functions. This
view is usually put forth by the vi camp during editor wars.

There are dozens of alternative interpretation for "EMACS".

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.html

My favourite:

Elsewhere Maybe All Commands are Simple

Dan.
 
M

Martin Gregorie

Twisted said:
This seems to be a closer analogy with emacs versus normal Windows
text editors.
>
Windows text editors are not normal: most are devoid of all but the most
primitive functions and are further hampered by having an interface that
required frequent time wasting hand transfers from keyboard to mouse
because, if they provide keyboard equivalents at all, these are
remarkably unmemorable and/or undocumented.

Ask anybody who used early versions of Word and you'll hear just how
much faster Word for DOS 5 was than any of its Windows incarnations.
This was because all commands were keystrokes so a skilled typist could
keep both hands on the keyboard all the time. WinWord's interface is a
clunker by comparison.

As for documentation, lets look at vi. Not a great editor, but every
*nix variation has it installed and any fool can learn to use it in
about 2 hours flat and it does at least have good pattern matching.

Can't find its documentation? Never heard of manpages ("man vi") or
apropos ("apropos vi")? My copy of vi understands ":help" and tells you
so if you start it without any arguments.

Amongst its benefits are that you can do anything its capable of by
using only a standard QUERTY keyboard plus ESC - no function keys, etc
are needed - which can save your bacon if somebody misconfigured your
console or the computer is dieing. Beyond that it has user-configurable
KEY BINDINGS so you can also set it up to suit both yourself and that
fancy keyboard in front of you.

Arguably even the weird controls are superior in some
way -- but only if you got used to them,
>
You mean that Alt-Esc or Windows-e aren't weird? How long is it since
you tried to use Windows with a dead mouse? There are a set of arcane
keystrokes to replace anything you can do with a mouse but I bet 99% of
windows users don't know any of them apart from TAB and CTRL-ALT-DEL.
The above applies equally to vi and its derivatives, if not more so --
vi is like taking that same already-wacky car with the two separate
throttles and adding, in a fit of quaint nostalgia, the need to
actually crank-start its engine. ;)
If you can't learn enough vi to get by with in half a morning you're
probably well out of your depth here on comp.lang.java.programmer.

Oh, I forgot: you don't read manuals so you ARE out of your depth.
 
D

David Kastrup

Twisted said:
Given that in its out-of-the-box configuration it's well-nigh unusable
without a printed-out "cheat sheet" of some kind, of the sort that
were supposed to have died out in the 80s, getting it customized poses
something of a catch-22 for anyone trying to get started using it.

"Catch 22" is the right phrase here: just catch Emacs 22 and get
started. Its out-of-the-box configuration is quite sensible.

What was the last version you said you actually tried out?
 
D

David Kastrup

Twisted said:
I won't dignify your insulting twaddle and random ad-hominem verbiage
with any more responses after this one. Something with actual logical
argumentation to rebut may be another matter of course.

One more GG issue: those stupid star ratings. So potentially
prejudicial. So easy to game, as evidenced by your managing to somehow
vote 82 times(!) against one of my posts in a matter of minutes.

It has not occured to you that actually thousands of people read those
postings? And they are heavily crossposted to boot (redirecting
followup to comp.emacs, I would suggest everybody else do the same).

And you have really nothing worthwhile to contribute. So if there is
some rating system (I don't use Google Groups so can't tell) in place,
your postings would certainly be good candidates for downrating.

Not that this posting of mine is much better, and actually the
followup-to comp.emacs would indicate that this is about Emacs.
However, you have still not given any information about what, if any,
version of Emacs your very vaguely expressed experiences are supposed
to have come from.
So far I've found a less-impressive method to game them -- it's not
hard to get throwaway accounts elsewhere, send yourself there a
gmail invite, and create many GG accounts.

And you wonder that people don't find it worthwhile reading you...
Handy to get around their onerous posting limits. Handy for stuffing
the star-vote ballot boxes with multiple votes, too, but there's no
way I can see to generate 82 of them that fast by that method, and
that much logging in and out in that short a time using different
accounts but from just one IP address is sure to come up on Google's
radar somehow, with unpredictable but probably bad results.

Uh, is there some monetary compensation for star ratings? Or what's
the deal? Really, if somebody can come up with a better group for
followups, feel free to direct there.
How did you do it? I'm guessing they stop the link for voting
appearing as a usable link on the page for a) your own posts and b)
the ones you've voted for, but the link's URL still works, so if you
use a script to keep fetching the appropriate URL ...

What a crazy obsession.
 
S

Sascha Bohnenkamp

E M A C S
i e n o w
g g d n a
h a t p
t b i p
y n i
t o n
e u g
s s
l
o y
f

m
e
m
o
r
y
 
S

Sascha Bohnenkamp

Windows text editors are not normal: most are devoid of all but the most
primitive functions and are further hampered by having an interface that
required frequent time wasting hand transfers from keyboard to mouse
because, if they provide keyboard equivalents at all, these are
remarkably unmemorable and/or undocumented.

well ultra-edit, textpad, source-insight etc. pp are better than that
(and run on windows)
 
A

anno4000

Dave Hansen said:
Speaking of which, vi is a piece of wombat do. ;-)

You can have Emacs when you pry it from my cold hypertrophied
escape-pressing pinky!

Anno
 
K

Karsten Wutzke

Yaawn!
Xah
(e-mail address removed)
∑http://xahlee.org/

Hmm I just had to think about the C64/Amiga etc. game "California
Games"... The game displayed a comment when the player broke his neck
the 13th time when BMXing:

"Geek of the week!"

Karsten
 
M

Martin Gregorie

Sascha said:
well ultra-edit, textpad, source-insight etc. pp are better than that
(and run on windows)

I said MOST, not all!

To your list I'd add PFE and a Windows port of microEmacs, which has
almost nothing in common with EMACS except some key bindings.

But to return to your point: how many Windows users actually install the
editors we've listed? I bet most never get past Wordpad. I've even found
people using Word, of all things, to edit BAT files and program source.

I'd give long odds that Windows users who use editors other than Wordpad
are using the one that came with whatever IDE they've installed, simply
because integrated editors are much more common in Windows-only IDEs
that they are on *nixen. My guess is that this is because the standard
editors (Wordpad, edlin) are so bad.
 
J

Jeff Higgins

Martin Gregorie wrote
I said MOST, not all!

Will you kindly list ALL Windows text editors so I can make my own
comparison?
Or even MOST?
To your list I'd add PFE and a Windows port of microEmacs, which has
almost nothing in common with EMACS except some key bindings.

But to return to your point: how many Windows users actually install the
editors we've listed? I bet most never get past Wordpad. I've even found
people using Word, of all things, to edit BAT files and program source.

I'd give long odds that Windows users who use editors other than Wordpad
are using the one that came with whatever IDE they've installed, simply
because integrated editors are much more common in Windows-only IDEs that
they are on *nixen. My guess is that this is because the standard editors
(Wordpad, edlin) are so bad.

I'm a Windows user who has installed, and quite regularly use, a fairly wide
variety of \text\ editors, depending upon the type of \text\ I'm editing.

JH
 
R

Roy Smith

David Kastrup <[email protected]> said:
Actually, the "E" in "Emacs" stands for "extensible". Part of the
appeal of Emacs is that you can change it to accommodate you.

Actually, the "E" in Emacs stands for "Editor". And the macs part stands
for "Macros". As in "Editor Macros". It started out as a bunch of macros
written in TECO.
 
D

David Kastrup

Roy Smith said:
Actually, the "E" in Emacs stands for "Editor". And the macs part
stands for "Macros". As in "Editor Macros". It started out as a
bunch of macros written in TECO.

It's not like I did not know this. Don't ask me what got into my head
here.
 
B

Bjorn Borud

[Twisted <[email protected]>]
|
| Given that in its out-of-the-box configuration it's well-nigh unusable
| without a printed-out "cheat sheet" of some kind, of the sort that
| were supposed to have died out in the 80s, getting it customized poses
| something of a catch-22 for anyone trying to get started using it.

indeed, not adhering to the half a dozen keybinding and menu
conventions that most newer applications use on OSX and Windows today
is not ideal UI design, but it doesn't really present that much of a
problem either; so it ends up being a non-issue to any regular user.
(actually, it isn't merely a case of changing some keybindings and
names -- the problem is that Emacs has a bunch of concepts that are
not easily mapped to trivial editor semantics, so it would be hard to
change without causing further confusion).

Emacs isn't really meant for the casual user and there are editors far
better suited for those who think spending an afternoon learning it is
too much. (compare to VI or VIM, which probably takes even a bit
longer to grasp, but which is beautifully practical once you
understand how it works. there's this good tech-talk given by Bram
Moolenaar available¹ on about text editing and VIM).


¹) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078

-Bjørn
 
B

Bjorn Borud

[Martin Gregorie <[email protected]>]
|
| As for documentation, lets look at vi. Not a great editor, but every
| *nix variation has it installed and any fool can learn to use it in
| about 2 hours flat and it does at least have good pattern matching.

there's also the "info" system in Emacs, which not only covers Emacs
itself, but usually also a lot of documentation available for Emacs
extensions and other programs. again, this predates a lot of things
that people are used to today, so just because it seems (and sometimes
is) a bit more fiddly, it must necessarily be inferior.

the most common theme when people have to choose between products is
that they are not really comparing what it is like to use the products
like they were intended -- they are merely underlining that X is not
Y. for instance, Linux has come a long way in addressing the needs of
desktop users, yet some people refuse to use Linux because it doesn't
behave *exactly* like Windows (as if that was a worthwhile goal) and
they are too lazy or don't think they can manage, to learn a new
system.

-Bjørn
 
B

Bjorn Borud

[BartlebyScrivener <[email protected]>]
|
| http://www.debian-administration.org/polls/89

this is hardly surprising. I use both editors. for most sysadmin
tasks I use vi(m). for programming i use Emacs.

in part out of old habit (most UNIX systems had vi installed) and
partly because vi(m) is faster (which makes it more suitable when you
just need to change a couple of lines in a file).

for programming I use Emacs since I have a gazillion extensions I use
while programming that I don't even think about anymore. from various
forms of automated text completion to syntax checking/highlighting, to
enforcing style guides, look up symbol relationships, compile, debug
etc.


so if the context was system administration, I'd vote for vi as
well. if the context was programming I'd vote Emacs.

-Bjørn
 
D

David Kastrup

Bjorn Borud said:
[BartlebyScrivener <[email protected]>]
|
| http://www.debian-administration.org/polls/89

this is hardly surprising. I use both editors. for most sysadmin
tasks I use vi(m). for programming i use Emacs.

in part out of old habit (most UNIX systems had vi installed) and
partly because vi(m) is faster (which makes it more suitable when you
just need to change a couple of lines in a file).

The idea is to start Emacs once and use it for everything.
so if the context was system administration, I'd vote for vi as
well. if the context was programming I'd vote Emacs.

You know you can use something like
C-x C-f /su::/etc/fstab RET
(or /sudo::/etc/fstab) in order to edit files as root in a normal
Emacs session?
 

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