B
blmblm
[ snip ]
Pretty much. "Common User Access". I thought this was a
well-known acronym in Windowsland, but I guess not. A Google
search on "CUA" finds the Wikipedia article as the second hit.
[ snip ]
[ snip ]
Pretty much. "Common User Access". I thought this was a
well-known acronym in Windowsland, but I guess not. A Google
search on "CUA" finds the Wikipedia article as the second hit.
[ snip ]
B
blmblm
[ snip ]
A few words from someone else with a strong preference for "learn
one editor well and use it for all text editing" (though maybe
I should admit that my preference is for vim) ....:
I use Eclipse in teaching second-semester programming, mostly
because my department decided it was good to expose students to
command-line tools in CS1 and a "modern" IDE in CS2. In general
it's annoying not to have all those years of vi(m) experience
making things easy for me, and a lot of the features others find
wonderful I find annoying, *but*:
Eclipse has something that generates "import" statements with
a few keystrokes, and for me that's almost in the "killer app
[feature]" class. (Why do I strongly suspect that with the
right plug-ins emacs can do this too?
That would send
me searching for the Web site where vim macros are collected.)
A few words from someone else with a strong preference for "learn
one editor well and use it for all text editing" (though maybe
I should admit that my preference is for vim) ....:
I use Eclipse in teaching second-semester programming, mostly
because my department decided it was good to expose students to
command-line tools in CS1 and a "modern" IDE in CS2. In general
it's annoying not to have all those years of vi(m) experience
making things easy for me, and a lot of the features others find
wonderful I find annoying, *but*:
Eclipse has something that generates "import" statements with
a few keystrokes, and for me that's almost in the "killer app
[feature]" class. (Why do I strongly suspect that with the
right plug-ins emacs can do this too?
That would sendme searching for the Web site where vim macros are collected.)
T
Twisted
I think I need to clarify. What I expect is that I can have the
application and the documentation open side by side, a) without
needing to use the application's own navigation methods to navigate to/
from or within the documentation given that that can create a
catch-22, and b) without paying extra.
If a printed manual comes with the thing, without paying extra, then
it clearly qualifies as such documentation.
If I have to print it myself it doesn't, because ink doesn't grow on
trees. Paper does, but they still manage to charge money for that too.
If I have to purchase the manual separately it likewise doesn't.
So the options are: printed manual that ships with the software at no
extra charge, or online documentation I can read "the normal way".
Emacs in control of the console has neither. (Emacs relegated to a
single terminal window on a graphical workstation may not have such a
big problem.)
Regardless, having to reach for the help every two minutes doesn't
enamor me of an application unless there's a darn good reason for it,
such as it's actually rocket science. 3D modeling I expect to be
tricky at times. Text editing should be just-sit-down-crack-knuckles-
and-do-it obviously.
First, I didn't claim the ideal WP was necessarily perfectly WYSIWYG.
On the other hand, even so it might be that hand-hacking the
underlying representation might in some cases be a faster way to
achieve a particular goal than doing it "the WYSIWYG way". You'd still
have a WYSIWYG preview available either way of course.
Your quiet change from discussing word processing to discussing
WYSIWYG is interesting. Is that how you generally go about fighting
your verbal battles, by quietly shifting the specific thing under
debate to whatever would have made your opponent blatantly wrong IF
they had been talking about that thing instead of what they really
were?
Programming in role-playing game? And I meant my roguelike-filesystem-
interface suggestion at least partly in jest...
Anyway, obsolete or merely obscure, it obviously failed to hit the big
time since us ordinary joes are still mostly using various forms of
Windoze and wishing for something more reliable and secure that didn't
also have gratuitous user interface weirdnesses.
If it's so great, why hasn't it, and why hasn't OS/400 managed to
escape from persistent obscurity?
In other words, the implementation was a dog. That doesn't refute the
basic concept's validity. If it recorded mouse actions by noting the
keyboard equivalents (e.g. recorded a file menu drop down and file
open click as alt, f, o given that the application has the usual
keybindings in the file menu), and provided ways for advanced users to
edit them and such ...
In response to the other postings of the last 24 hours or so I have
just two things to say:
1. Regarding someone saying I had "no clue how to do things in Unix"
when I noted that the inability to copy and paste graphics or other
non-ascii data between applications caused awkwardness, I don't see
any grounds there for an insulting response. If desktop environments
do provide some mechanism suitable for generic clipboard actions (the
basic X clipboard is clearly inadequate) then they do so unobviously,
and probably all differently from one another. Being able to do
serious work with graphics requires being able to move snippets of
graphics around handily without all the mechanics of explicitly saving
them all to various temporary files, and later remembering to delete
the files. More generally, if a common Windows workflow isn't
supported, then even if an alternative workflow is that is as
effective and efficient it would take some getting used to.
Interface-wise, the world has standardized on how Windoze (and the
Mac) does things. Breaking such defacto standards makes software
harder to use by the vast majority of likely new users.
2. Regarding these graphical derivatives (apparently plural) of emacs,
has nobody considered that this means that Xah had already won before
he'd even fired his shot?
Someone obviously felt the need for amore usable emacs and delivered one. In that case it's a fait
accompli. Criticisms leveled at original-emacs shouldn't bother users
of the graphical versions regardless. The one complaint might be that
both of us had out of date information and were fighting a war our
side had already won years ago.
Unless of course these are all klunky bolted-on GUIs of the sort all
too common when porting unix software to Windows or the Mac or for use
under X, which don't work quite right or are clearly poorly integrated
with the application's internals...about which I currently have no
information. And no, I'm not about to spend hours downloading half a
gig of bloated who-knows-what just to find out, tyvm.
J
Joost Kremers
[Followup-To: header set to comp.emacs]
because emacs exposes its lisp system to the user, allowing one to add
basically any functionality one can come up with? ;-)
blmblm said:Eclipse has something that generates "import" statements with
a few keystrokes, and for me that's almost in the "killer app
[feature]" class. (Why do I strongly suspect that with the
right plug-ins emacs can do this too?
because emacs exposes its lisp system to the user, allowing one to add
basically any functionality one can come up with? ;-)
T
Twisted
With the latest stuff like Ubuntu, you're pretty much right ... until
something goes wrong. Windows has safe mode and System Restore and, if
push comes to shove, a recovery disk or partition. Linux has ... the
command line, or worse a GRUB or fsck prompt at startup. No access to
accessible, easy to browse help right when you need it most.
Blow away the partition with everything on it and reinstall? y/n _
Sometimes it's not that bad. Sometimes it's just some X thing needing
tweaking, or a particular thing elsewhere that's broken, but it
requires at minimum hand-hacking a .rc file and running some stuff in
a terminal window (aka command line, but with maybe more easily
available and navigable help, since at minimum you can open two side
by side and leave one open to the output of man or less).
T
Twisted
You'll be happy to know then that my opinion is that the phone system
is archaic too. Exposing the numerical network addresses like that is
so 1970s; where's the phone version of DNS, given that the technology
to develop it is clearly there now, and (from my experiences with the
phone menus at some 800 numbers) even the technology for you to just
pick up the handset, say someone's name, and have it look them up and
ring them, possibly after being prompted to accept long distance
charges, reverse them, or cancel if it's LD.
We'll actually probably see a generation of friendlier phones RSN --
either regular phones, or because VoIP providers leapfrog them and
advance rapidly leaving the old telcos eating dust when these don't
advance their technology and interfaces.
Setting up and using voice mail or speed-dial keys still tends to be
*painful*. There's still an excuse for that with cell phones since you
can't put a more sophisticated interface onto something the size of a
credit card, but a phone that takes up a substantial chunk of desk
space really should have more than a tiny LCD screen and twelve tone
keys. The only reason nobody complains much is because they're so bog
standard everyone is used to them and knows how to operate them. If we
had modern internet and other services and someone tried to introduce
the touch-tone telephone system now, the market would reject it in a
heartbeat and pursue VoIP, and Techdirt would run a "Failures"
category article blaming the terrible UI and excessive fee structure.
The same sort of inertia that let the phone system survive mostly
unchanged over the last 20 years without improving its UI much keeps
some old unix tools beloved by those who mastered them, and of course
propels Windows, which has done some dumb things with its UI (and much
worse under the hood).
D
David Kastrup
Twisted said:
Emacs is a graphical derivative of Emacs? What nonsense. The
canonical Emacs as distributed and copyrighted by the FSF is a GUI
application on a large number of platforms.
has nobody considered that this means that Xah had already won
before he'd even fired his shot?
It just means that you have no clue what Xah has been talking about.
Xah was concerned about keybindings and terminology. Never mind that
there are menus (with keyboard shortcuts displayed automatically),
toolbars, scrollbars, multiple frames, font support, mouse support and
so forth and so on. Xah knows this since he actually _uses_ Emacs.
The graphical versions _are_ original Emacs.
The one complaint might be that both of us had out of date
information and were fighting a war our side had already won years
ago.
You just have no clue what Xah has been talking about.
You have had no information about _anything_ right from the start.
And no, I'm not about to spend hours downloading half a gig of
bloated who-knows-what just to find out, tyvm.
You could start with the current NEWS file at
<URL:http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/emacs/etc/NEWS?root=emacs&view=markup&pathrev=EMACS_22_1>
which describes everything which is new in Emacs 22.1 (and will give
quite a few ideas about what has already been there in earlier
versions).
Of course, you'll whine together some excuse why you can't be bothered
getting some information about Emacs, never mind that you post several
dozens of embarrassing tirades that are completely based on nonsense
of your own imagination.
J
JackT
You have no idea what Xah was talking about.
Xah knows the ONE TRUE EMACS has had GUI capability
since early 1980s.
To summarize:
Richard Stallman was the original author of the original Emacs,
but he wrote it while he was an employee of another company,
so that company owned his code.
Richard Stallman then quit the company, rewrote Emacs from
scratch, and this emacs is now sometimes called the GNU emacs.
GNU emacs (and forks of it) is the only emacs today.
GNU emacs is a continuous product from about 1980 to 2007:
Richard Stallman is still writing code for it even now.
GNU emacs will gladly use the GUI library on the system
if available. So GNU emacs will launch Windows file menus
on Windows, and will launch GTK file menu on Linux, etc.
GNU emacs will also run in a text mode window gladly.
I use it all the time when I'm connected to a remote system
via SSH.
GNU emacs starts out with an initial help screen every time you run
it.
Every time.
If you don't believe one (or more) fact, please point out which one,
and we can try to prove it.
- JackT
J
JackT
Sorry, I meant early 1990s.
I believe it was 1993 or so (it is in the web page).
- JackT
A
Adriano Varoli Piazza
Twisted said:
I suppose you never used Ubuntu's disc for anything but installing or
reformatting either, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing that
can be done with it. You can boot with it, have a working net
connection (or create it) and solve many problems in the comfort of
the full GUI, and with all the help available from the web.
As for the available help on Windows, I didn't know Windows Safe mode
let you connect to the Intertubes, or that its help was of any help in
those situations.
Really, if you have no idea, it's ok to refrain from posting.
T
Twisted
Ah, if you have a live CD this might indeed be possible. If you can
get it to mount your usual hdd partitions to go sniffing around the
configuration files that might be gummed up, and if doing this isn't
insanely complicated anyway.
A Windows restore CD or recovery partition doesn't do anything of the
sort, although a genuine install CD has a repair function, which can
among other things fix problems with the MBR and reinstall key Windoze
components on the hdd. If you can boot to safe mode you can fix most
things with System Restore, which simply lets you roll back the
configuration to before that ill-advised install, uninstall, driver
update, or whatever it was that hosed things. I've had to resort to it
exactly twice; once when firewall software b0rked the system on
install and put it in infinite-reboot mode (safe mode halted the loop)
and once when nVidia released some driver update that hosed the 3D
accelerator and screwed up the available graphics modes. System
Restore works by quietly backing up key files (DLLs, config files, and
suchlike) and registry trees when an installer is run and under some
other circumstances, including a manual instruction to create a save
point, which you can use before you try anything dodgy so you can roll
back to right before the attempt if it goes wrong. Ordinary document
files and the like aren't backed up or anything by this, however. If
they get hosed, they get hosed, although System Restore won't damage
them any more than it will back them up.
I've managed to fix driver and networking problems a few times, and
sometimes on someone else's computer, with and without system restore.
Most of the times if I've seen any flavor of unix misbehaving, it's
been find a bigger geek or resort to beads and rattles; it's been far
from obvious what the problem was from the error messages, let alone
what the fix was, and often the problem precluded access to any useful
tools or documentation simultaneously. A live CD might make that less
of an issue, though it would still be a pain if you had to keep using
it as a workaround for days while waiting for a mailing list or usenet
response explaining what the f*#! "bad zixflob in fuzzwangle.rc,
aborting" meant and how to fix it, especially as a system-wide search
didn't turn up any files named "fuzzwangle.rc" -- or whatever the
problem was.
[Insulting insinuation snipped]
Oh, sod off.
T
Twisted
Having to pay for the documentation, presumably because it's
copyrighted, doesn't strike me as much more "free as in speech" than
it is "free as in beer". Also being dependent on a particular
publisher for access to required documentation violates "free as in no
vendor lock-in", to boot. So anyone saying some "free" software is
unusable without such-and-such an O'Reilly book can go peddle the
software and the book somewhere where spammers are welcome. Being
locked in to O'Reilly being just as bad as being locked in to
Microsoft or Adobe.
T
Twisted
And the myth of the bicycle being easy to learn persists. Did you know
that kids learn better than adults do? Why do kids pick up at least
one language without any conscious effort, while adults trying to
learn one more often struggle in night school?
I know people who find all kinds of vehicles easy to learn but never
mastered a bicycle (despite trying). People, plural, as in more than
one of them.
Anyway, I know which comes with a fatter manual -- the Benz...
G
Giorgos Keramidas
You don't have to "pay for the documentation because it is copyrighted".
You can _download_ the Emacs manual in any format you are more
comfortable with.
See for example:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html
This page lists downloadable documentation in nicely formatted HTML or
PDF formats, which is available without any sort of monetary charge.
Since you are not obliged to _pay_ for the O'Reilly version, this entire
paragraph is both meaningless and moot. Feel free to grab an online
copy of the manual, or install the documentation of Emacs using your
favorite distribution's packaging tools. There is absolutely no
"lock-in" anywhere near Emacs.
- Giorgos
B
Bent C Dalager
Immersion and isolation. I can promise you that if you were dropped in
the middle of a country where no one spoke your language, you would be
learning theirs pretty fast.
Cheers
Bent D
G
Gian Uberto Lauri
n> So now we're expected to go on a filesystem fishing expedition
n> instead of just hit F1? One small step (backwards) for a man; one
n> giant leap (backwards) for mankind.
Waring, possible ID TEN T detected!
There's a program called find, not this intuitive but worth learning
It could solve the problem from the root with something like
find / -name refcard.ps -exec lpr {} \; 2> /dev/null
This line requires some brain and some learning, true, but the
documents should be on your HD, unless you avoided installing the man
to save space.
About the brain, you should have received like me a standard issue one
at least (or maybe a better one).
n> So much for the "free" in "free software". If you can't actually
n> use it without paying money, whether for the software or for some
n> book, it isn't really free, is it?
GNU books ARE free, and come in both printed and electronic form.
No excuses.
BTW, buing a GNU book is a good way to finance FSF.
And from your too-lazy (ID TEN T like) point of view even freedom
itself is not free, since its defence has a cost.
--
/\ ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
//--\| | \| | Integralista GNUslamico
\/ e coltivatore diretto di Software
A Cesare avrei detto di scrivermi a (e-mail address removed)
n> instead of just hit F1? One small step (backwards) for a man; one
n> giant leap (backwards) for mankind.
Waring, possible ID TEN T detected!
There's a program called find, not this intuitive but worth learning
It could solve the problem from the root with something like
find / -name refcard.ps -exec lpr {} \; 2> /dev/null
This line requires some brain and some learning, true, but the
documents should be on your HD, unless you avoided installing the man
to save space.
About the brain, you should have received like me a standard issue one
at least (or maybe a better one).
n> So much for the "free" in "free software". If you can't actually
n> use it without paying money, whether for the software or for some
n> book, it isn't really free, is it?
GNU books ARE free, and come in both printed and electronic form.
No excuses.
BTW, buing a GNU book is a good way to finance FSF.
And from your too-lazy (ID TEN T like) point of view even freedom
itself is not free, since its defence has a cost.
--
/\ ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
//--\| | \| | Integralista GNUslamico
\/ e coltivatore diretto di Software
A Cesare avrei detto di scrivermi a (e-mail address removed)
G
Gian Uberto Lauri
Long count = 12.19.14.7.15; tzolkin = 1 Men; haab = 3 Tzec.
T> And the myth of the bicycle being easy to learn persists. Did you
T> know that kids learn better than adults do? Why do kids pick up at
T> least one language without any conscious effort, while adults
T> trying to learn one more often struggle in night school?
Mostly because they block themselves with strange fears and due bad
teaching, the "fear" of a test, the lack of fun, the "constriction",
all block adults learning new language.
Pick an over 30, overloaded with (often) frustrating work, and give
her an university level course in languages with grammars and/or
alphabets completly different from those she uses (yesss, I am
thinking of a woman, my wife...) like Arab (alphabet and some grammar)
and Turkish (its grammar sound lispish to my ears), and she'll go
ahead without "fatigue" and with flying colours.
Children pick up other language without any conscious effort because
either they learn it by using with parents, relatives and friends or
they are involved in a game-like style of learning.
Why else hacker prize fun this much ?
T> I know people who find all kinds of vehicles easy to learn but
T> never mastered a bicycle (despite trying). People, plural, as in
T> more than one of them.
Again, fear, or maybe, some malfunction in the balancing organs. But
fear mainly. You do not see what keeps a bike upright and running, you
have to trust that you can.
You can walk on a 4 inch wide stripe on a floor without problems, but
when it is a 4 inch wide bar some feet over the floor...
--
/\ ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
//--\| | \| | Integralista GNUslamico
\/ e coltivatore diretto di Software
A Cesare avrei detto di scrivermi a (e-mail address removed)
T> And the myth of the bicycle being easy to learn persists. Did you
T> know that kids learn better than adults do? Why do kids pick up at
T> least one language without any conscious effort, while adults
T> trying to learn one more often struggle in night school?
Mostly because they block themselves with strange fears and due bad
teaching, the "fear" of a test, the lack of fun, the "constriction",
all block adults learning new language.
Pick an over 30, overloaded with (often) frustrating work, and give
her an university level course in languages with grammars and/or
alphabets completly different from those she uses (yesss, I am
thinking of a woman, my wife...) like Arab (alphabet and some grammar)
and Turkish (its grammar sound lispish to my ears), and she'll go
ahead without "fatigue" and with flying colours.
Children pick up other language without any conscious effort because
either they learn it by using with parents, relatives and friends or
they are involved in a game-like style of learning.
Why else hacker prize fun this much ?
T> I know people who find all kinds of vehicles easy to learn but
T> never mastered a bicycle (despite trying). People, plural, as in
T> more than one of them.
Again, fear, or maybe, some malfunction in the balancing organs. But
fear mainly. You do not see what keeps a bike upright and running, you
have to trust that you can.
You can walk on a 4 inch wide stripe on a floor without problems, but
when it is a 4 inch wide bar some feet over the floor...
--
/\ ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
//--\| | \| | Integralista GNUslamico
\/ e coltivatore diretto di Software
A Cesare avrei detto di scrivermi a (e-mail address removed)
M
Martin Gregorie
Maybe I should have clarified my viewpoint. When it comes to programsTwisted said:
that operate on the content of textual documents a word processor is
WYSIWYG by definition. Anything else is a text editor. You may have a
different view but that's mine.
See above. We were actually discussing text editors whose formatting
capabilities (unless they are syntax-sensitive) are generally limited to
line wrapping and auto-indentation. You introduced more complex document
reformatting - something that I regard as a capability of word
processors rather than text editors.
RPG is "Report Generating Program" in the context of programming
languages. The RPG language is horrid: its a bastardized, fixed column
assembler derivative that's been shoehorned into a typical report
generator's processing loop. Even PL/1 and COBOL shine as paragons of
programming language design by comparison.
A fair question. I don't know, but it probably has a lot to do with AIX
and the UNIX command shell with its great power but lack of consistency
in naming, etc.
True, but doing better would be really hard because of all the
information and context that would need to be associated with every
mouse click in case it was needed to record a macro. At best it might
make macro recording tedious. At worst it could make the whole GUI
unresponsive.
M
Matthias Buelow
Twisted wrote:
[...]
Hey dude,
get back to selling used cars and leave us computer geeks alone, will ya?
Thanks.
[...]
Hey dude,
get back to selling used cars and leave us computer geeks alone, will ya?
Thanks.
D
David Kastrup
Matthias Buelow said:
Well, how will his customers react to the stories about avoiding
Mercedes cars because of people getting hit in the face by the crank
start?