N
notbob
It's not. I discovered, quite by accident, wordpad is the superior
text editor in windows. It even properly formats those cryptic brag
pages crackers put in cracked software.
nb
It's not. I discovered, quite by accident, wordpad is the superior
text editor in windows. It even properly formats those cryptic brag
pages crackers put in cracked software.
nb
B
Bjorn Borud
[Robert Uhl <[email protected]>]
|
| Once again I am forced to wonder if you have _ever_ actually used
| emacs. find-file has tab completion: hit tab without anything typed, and
| it displays _everything_ in the directory; type a few characters to
| narrow it down; hit tab to complete the filename and be done with
| it.
....and of course, in addition you have access to history so you can
easily find previous parameters and edit them. this makes it very
efficient when you need to fiddle about in deep directory trees in a
way no GUI can yet offer.
....and then there's bookmarking, which is very good for keeping a set
of files (and locations) handy for quick access.
-Bjørn
|
| Once again I am forced to wonder if you have _ever_ actually used
| emacs. find-file has tab completion: hit tab without anything typed, and
| it displays _everything_ in the directory; type a few characters to
| narrow it down; hit tab to complete the filename and be done with
| it.
....and of course, in addition you have access to history so you can
easily find previous parameters and edit them. this makes it very
efficient when you need to fiddle about in deep directory trees in a
way no GUI can yet offer.
....and then there's bookmarking, which is very good for keeping a set
of files (and locations) handy for quick access.
-Bjørn
B
Bjorn Borud
[Twisted <[email protected]>]
|
| Really? None of this happens if you just do the straightforward file-
| open command, which should obviously at least provide a navigable
| directory tree, but definitely does not.
well, if you insist on using Emacs in the most clumsy way possible,
then of course, not it won't be easy. it is very obvious to any Emacs
user that you haven't bothered learning Emacs at all. go away, troll.
-Bjørn
|
| Really? None of this happens if you just do the straightforward file-
| open command, which should obviously at least provide a navigable
| directory tree, but definitely does not.
well, if you insist on using Emacs in the most clumsy way possible,
then of course, not it won't be easy. it is very obvious to any Emacs
user that you haven't bothered learning Emacs at all. go away, troll.
-Bjørn
B
Bjorn Borud
[Robert Uhl <[email protected]>]
|
| Agreed. Stallman got sidetracked by Scheme, which IMHO was a
| dead-end.
too many people buying SICP and believing what they heard about it
being an important book. I too spent some time exploring Scheme, or
should I say, wasted some time, years ago, and nothing came of it
other than a profound irritation. these people seemed to be
completely disconnected from reality.
Scheme, and thus Guile, might have been a viable path if these people
had only been practical instead of stubbornly insisting on being odd.
| A Common Lisp emacs would be pretty sweet. There's a Climacs project,
| but they're just focused on providing an editor, not on providing a
| full-fledged emacs.
if nothing else, a proper Emacs in Common Lisp might give me a reason
to learn Lisp properly.
-Bjørn
|
| Agreed. Stallman got sidetracked by Scheme, which IMHO was a
| dead-end.
too many people buying SICP and believing what they heard about it
being an important book. I too spent some time exploring Scheme, or
should I say, wasted some time, years ago, and nothing came of it
other than a profound irritation. these people seemed to be
completely disconnected from reality.
Scheme, and thus Guile, might have been a viable path if these people
had only been practical instead of stubbornly insisting on being odd.
| A Common Lisp emacs would be pretty sweet. There's a Climacs project,
| but they're just focused on providing an editor, not on providing a
| full-fledged emacs.
if nothing else, a proper Emacs in Common Lisp might give me a reason
to learn Lisp properly.
-Bjørn
B
Bjorn Borud
[Twisted <[email protected]>]
| > Of course, emacs doesn't take years of mastery. It takes 30, 40
| > minutes.
|
| I gave it twice that, and it failed to grow on me in that amount of
| time.
then it just wasn't meant to be. stick to Notepad.
| If I haven't, it must be the case that finding this tutorial (or even
| discovering that it exists) was nontrivial, or it wasn't built into
| emacs, one or the other.
when Emacs on my machine starts it says the following:
Welcome to GNU Emacs, one component of a Linux-based GNU system.
Get help C-h (Hold down CTRL and press h)
Undo changes C-x u Exit Emacs C-x C-c
Get a tutorial C-h t Use Info to read docs C-h i
Ordering manuals C-h RET
Activate menubar F10 or ESC ` or M-`
(`C-' means use the CTRL key. `M-' means use the Meta (or Alt) key.
If you have no Meta key, you may instead type ESC followed by the
character.)
if you haven't found the tutorial, you haven't really tried very hard.
-Bjørn
| > Of course, emacs doesn't take years of mastery. It takes 30, 40
| > minutes.
|
| I gave it twice that, and it failed to grow on me in that amount of
| time.
then it just wasn't meant to be. stick to Notepad.
| If I haven't, it must be the case that finding this tutorial (or even
| discovering that it exists) was nontrivial, or it wasn't built into
| emacs, one or the other.
when Emacs on my machine starts it says the following:
Welcome to GNU Emacs, one component of a Linux-based GNU system.
Get help C-h (Hold down CTRL and press h)
Undo changes C-x u Exit Emacs C-x C-c
Get a tutorial C-h t Use Info to read docs C-h i
Ordering manuals C-h RET
Activate menubar F10 or ESC ` or M-`
(`C-' means use the CTRL key. `M-' means use the Meta (or Alt) key.
If you have no Meta key, you may instead type ESC followed by the
character.)
if you haven't found the tutorial, you haven't really tried very hard.
-Bjørn
B
Bjorn Borud
[Twisted <[email protected]>]
|
| and you said that depended on the definition of "expert". Apparently
| you believe there is a type of "expert" for whom beginner-friendly
| software is intrinsically less usable than beginner-hostile
| software.
no, I was alluding to you thinking that posession of knowledge which
is considered rudimentary basics for Emacs somehow elevates the person
in question to an "expert". just because you have not, by your own
admission, been able to even locate the built-in tutorial, I don't
think your definition of "expert" is very relevant.
-Bjørn
|
| and you said that depended on the definition of "expert". Apparently
| you believe there is a type of "expert" for whom beginner-friendly
| software is intrinsically less usable than beginner-hostile
| software.
no, I was alluding to you thinking that posession of knowledge which
is considered rudimentary basics for Emacs somehow elevates the person
in question to an "expert". just because you have not, by your own
admission, been able to even locate the built-in tutorial, I don't
think your definition of "expert" is very relevant.
-Bjørn
D
David Kastrup
Bjorn Borud said:
Since he did not ever download a copy of Emacs in the last 10 years
(and won't according to his own statements download anything or look
at any web page because his computer incompetency makes him incapable
of avoiding or detecting viruses) one can hardly blame him for not
finding the tutorial in software he did not download.
K
Kjetil S. Matheussen
Did you expect something specific before starting to read that
book? Thats a failure. SICP is a book you should read just for pure
pleasure.
Please don't write things like that without backing it up with some
reason.
T
Twisted
Some people might say the same thing about emacs. A lot of unix tools
even. "Stubbornly insisting on being odd" appears to be a particularly
prevalent character flaw among the geeknoscenti.
T
Twisted
And dead before I could make any use of it. Human beings don't tend to
last very long when they are unable to obtain adequate nutrition, and
barring the right environment and skill-set for hunter-gathering or
farming, that requires successfully performing transactions with the
locals to obtain food.
T
Twisted
Good thing it has these. Bookmarking is quite natural and is THE way
in GUIs to cope with deep directory structures. Bookmarking in a GUI
is simple: you just open file-browser windows and park them in oft-
visited places, to flip to whenever needed. Multitasking window
systems are neat that way. Current versions of Windoze Explorer have a
history and back and forward navigation buttons reminiscent of a Web
browser, too.
None of them turn into as big a PITA when lots of files have a
lengthy, identical prefix either, which is a fairly common situation.
That only causes difficulty at all when some column or window is sized
too narrowly to show parts of the name past the prefix, forcing
scrolling. Resizing it is then easy, thanks to the GUI, so unless the
prefix is wide enough to cross the entire screen even if you set the
font size down to 3... contrast that with tab completion, where to
disambiguate you'll have to type the entire prefix and then part of
the rest, THEN hit tab. If the prefix is long, you might be saving 3
keystrokes reducing 47 to 44, a gain in productivity of about 7%, a
figure I'm sure you'll agree is somewhat underwhelming. Of course with
a GUI it's spot-the-right-file-and-click, and just as fast whether the
prefix is 4 characters long or 40.
T
Twisted
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.
[snipping some thinly-veiled insults and irrelevancies throughout]
Let me get this straight.
In this corner, we have just about every Windows application ever
developed. When a user needs help, a click on the "help" menu or tap
of the F1 key is all it takes to obtain some. Sometimes the help is
not of the greatest quality, but that is another issue we won't
concern ourselves with here.
In the other corner, we have just about every Unix application ever
developed. When a user needs help, they may do such things as manually
explore the directories where the application was installed
(equivalent to rooting around in C:\Program Files\Appname for .hlp
files, because F1 didn't work and there was no "help" menu, if such a
thing ever happened on Windoze). Or alternatively it can just
magically come to them as a divinely inspired insight, or in a dream
or a burning bush or stone tablets from heaven or something, that
something useful might happen if the unlikely combination of symbols
"find / -name refcard.ps -exec lpr {} \; 2> /dev/null" were typed at
the console, which otherwise would obviously never occur to them. Even
if they knew the find tool and its syntax, it would still have to
somehow occur to them that "refcard.ps" might be a useful search
target. On Windows, if push came to shove, clicking Start->Search and
putting in ".hlp" and "C:\Program Files\Appname" would quickly find
any help files. If they were given the usual file extension. If not,
good luck, but most usually the help files would be named to end
with .hlp. Moreover, once found, a quick double click and they're in a
hypertext browser viewing the help. Unless I miss my guess, refcard.ps
would require mucking about installing and configuring Ghostscript and
GSView, which for Joe Winblows User is daunting enough. Trying to read
anything serious and navigate in GSView is no picnic either. A
hypertext browser it ain't. Adobe Acrobat Reader *might* be able to do
more with a .ps file, but it's proprietary. On a Unix box, if you
don't know exactly how to get some app viewing a .ps file and how to
navigate in it I'm guessing you're SOL. The original suggestion with
"lpr" implies printing it rather than viewing it online, which a)
costs money and b) requires configuring a printer and a Postscript
interpreter, given that unless the printer cost more than the
computer's CPU it surely won't natively grok Postscript. We're back to
configuring Ghostscript, only this time on the Unix box where I have
no doubt it's even more painful than it is on a Windoze box, as well
as configuring a printer on a Unix box, itself a recurring nightmare
of mine for years now since one night in the nineties when I got
caught in the crossfire between someone's Epson inkjet and their
Mandrake 7.somethingorother Linux.
Reexamining that "find" line it looks like it tries to automatically
"lpr" the file(s) found. That is cause for concern, since I can easily
see something like this going into Sorceror's Apprentice mode and
costing you a fortune in ink and paper if there's either a misspelling
or other mistake (easy enough to make in a complex arcane command line
like that one) or more "refcard.ps" matches than you expected there'd
be in the target directory and its descendants.
T
Twisted
Actually, it's proven that there's a critical period for language
learning "coming naturally" that ends around age seven. Children
actually have enhanced learning abilities due to brain physiology and
plasticity.
Oh, come off it. One of those people is a physics professor, who knows
the mechanics of gyroscopic stability and things of that nature
backwards and forwards. And his sense of balance is fine -- he has no
trouble with that except when he's quite drunk. He told me the problem
was the bike tipping over before it could get up enough speed to
become stable. My own guess being there's a "knack" you may or may not
eventually get, for getting past that initial hurdle and getting it up
to speed when it becomes stable.
Of course, this "knack" isn't something found in any instruction
manual. I'm wondering if getting your head around unix arcana is also
dependent on an iffy "knack" where you "get it" and somehow know where
to look for documentation and problem fixes, despite everything having
its own idiosyncratic way, and "get" some sort of workflow trick
going, or you don't. Personally, the thing I always found most
irritating was the necessary frequent trips to the help. Even when the
help was easy to use (itself rare) that's a load of additional task
switching and crap. Of course, lots of the time the help was not easy
to use. Man pages and anything else viewed on a console, for example
-- generally you could not view it side by side with your work, but
instead interrupt the work, view it, try to memorize the one next
step, go back to your work, perform that next step, back to the help
to memorize another step ... that has all the workflow of a backed-up
sewer, yet until and unless the commands become second nature it's
what you're typically forced to do without a proper GUI. Navigating
also being a pain -- generally it's easy to get it to scroll down, or
exit; hard but usually possible to scroll up in case you overshoot;
and there's some arcane search capability, but it isn't
straightforward to use so you can't use it because you'd need to be
open to the help for the help viewer or other tool instead of the help
you're trying to search, and then your search would come up empty. The
searching-help instructions not being in the same help file as the
target of your search proves to be the final straw, and you throw up
your hands in disgust after going a few rounds with "thetool", "man
thetool", and "man man" and make an inch of progress in an hour, most
of it spent on typing, scrolling, or memorizing rather than on working
with "thetool".
Maybe the thing I really, REALLY deplore is simply having 99% of my
attention forced to deal with the mechanics of the job and the
mechanics of the help viewer and only 1% with the actual content of
the job, instead of the other way around.
N
notbob
On the plus side, you only have to learn it once. With new releases
of Windows/Office, more often than not, Bill n' The Boys rename
functions and hide them somewhere else in an attempt to make it look
like they actually did something, so you end up wasting a lot of time
relearning what you already knew. Talk about irritating!
nb
M
MSCHAEF.COM
Twisted said:
I just pressed F1 in a running session of a Emacs under Ubuntu Linux... it
brought up online help.
Such things happen _all the time_ on Windows, particularly if you count
help menus that lead solely to useless About boxes.
This might be a moot point anyway, given the high number of people I've
met that don't even bother reading online help in the first place.
-Mike
T
Timofei Shatrov
Oh the irony.
G
Gian Uberto Lauri
Long count = 12.19.14.7.16; tzolkin = 2 Cib; haab = 4 Tzec.
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.
T> [snipping some thinly-veiled insults and irrelevancies throughout]
T> Let me get this straight.
T> In this corner, we have just about every Windows application ever
T> developed. When a user needs help, a click on the "help" menu or
T> tap of the F1 key is all it takes to obtain some. Sometimes the
T> help is not of the greatest quality, but that is another issue we
T> won't concern ourselves with here.
Hmmm. I just activated the help hitting F1... WOHA, it says that if I
press k after F1 I get the description of what that key does...
T> In the other corner, we have just about every Unix application ever
T> developed. When a user needs help, they may do such things as
T> manually explore the directories where the application was
T> installed
Ever heard about the man command ? Is the first thing you learn to
do...
T> Or alternatively
T> it can just magically come to them as a divinely inspired insight,
If they are Windows user, I pity them, their brain could have been
damaged beyond repair.
They'll never be blessed by the idea that programs can do work for
them, and will bash restlessy their keyboard in antiquate sequences of
pre-automatic-controls tasks (as a reference, take a look to the
Metropolis movie)
T> or in a dream or a burning bush or stone tablets from heaven or
T> something, that something useful might happen if the unlikely
T> combination of symbols "find / -name refcard.ps -exec lpr {} \; 2>
T> /dev/null"
Nothing this divine. Just someone a bit more experienced than you are.
On the other hand I never seen such thing like a refcard, that's not
in the standard documentation system for such a modern toxic waste
like Word.
T> obviously never occur to them. Even if they knew the find tool and
T> its syntax, it would still have to somehow occur to them that
T> "refcard.ps" might be a useful search target.
Strange. I am *NOT* a native english speaker and I think my Q.I. tends
toward average from below, but refcard sound very useful to me, maybe
is short for "reference card" ?
T> came to shove, clicking Start->Search and putting in ".hlp" and
T> "C:\Program Files\Appname" would quickly find any help files.
I admit. find is less intuitive. But the stuff Windows comes with does
just that and nothing more. It will never suggest you that the long
boring task expecting you can be solved in a completely automatic
way with a little creative job.
T> most usually the help files would be named to end with
T> .hlp.
All, or that impaired of a O.S. could not understand they are help
files.
T> Moreover, once found, a quick double click and they're in a
T> hypertext browser viewing the help.
Emacs help was hypertextual when Dr. Watson plagued Windowd 3.11
users...
T> Unless I miss my guess,
T> refcard.ps would require mucking about installing and configuring
T> Ghostscript and GSView,
Splash, large miss.
You usually fire it to the local printer.
Uh, I understand. A Windows user could never have shared its HP720c
printer... Windows printer driver aren't known to be smart.
Not an Emacs flaw.
T> enough. Trying to read anything serious and navigate in GSView is
T> no picnic either.
A refcard, my dear, is something that goes on an A4/Letter sheet and
NEEDS NOT to be hypertextual.
T> Reader *might* be able to do more with a .ps file
With a PS file you can do just one thing, execute it. It's a program,
did you know ?
Ah, I never use Acroread. Xpdf does all the things really needed.
Uh, I forget. For Windows users getting a PDF out of a PS or HTML or
ASCII is not this easy unless they get some extra software (someone
ported CUPS to Windows ?). Again, not an Emacs fault.
T> On a Unix box, if you don't know exactly how to get
T> some app viewing a .ps file and how to navigate in it I'm guessing
T> you're SOL.
Stop guessing or all will know that all you know about Unix is that
is a 4 letter word, the first a capital U, the last an x.
On a Unix system either YOU are the sysadmin and know about all the
stuff you need to view, concot, print and bit-recycle PS files or
there's a sysadmin that did this for you. All with free (as in freedom)
stuff.
Most Unix users thinks that Word is a typewriter on steroids not worth
using due its poor output on paper, and are used to a typesetting
system that deals effortlessy with PS, PDF and so on. Uh, oh, Emacs
hypertextual manuals can be turned into a PS or PDF ready for a fine
professional printer...
T> The original suggestion with "lpr" implies printing it
T> rather than viewing it online, which a) costs money and b) requires
T> configuring a printer and a Postscript interpreter, given that
T> unless the printer cost more than the computer's CPU it surely
T> won't natively grok Postscript.
I will call you if I need some advice about cars. Maybe.
But not at all for computers.
refcard.ps is something you print and keep on a side when you start
using Emacs, as a REFERENCE for the key sequence, in the case you
forget some of them.
All the computer screen is devoted to your work, the sheet provides
some extra "real estate" for the help information, a sort of double
heading display. All you need to do is turn your eyes from the
monitor, maybe your eyes and read the informations. It coudl happen
that you need to flip the sheet. But you can keep both your work and
the help text "ready at your fingertips", and this is useful indeed:
you read the command keybinding, turn your eyes, type it and see the
result and/or continue your work.
Online viewing. Great deal.
Flip windows until you reach refcard. Read the command. Flip again
windows until you reach Emacs. Use the command (but you could have
forgot the key sequence - redo from start.
About money. Indeed ink/toner and paper costs. Electricity grows on
the spark tree so aboundant in our forests...
Configuring a printer. Yes you need to configure a printer. You need
it with Windows too. But if your Windows printer driver does not
handle PostScript (or if it does not let you share your printer) *now*
you are SOL. PostScript printing on a Windows system that does not
support PS is a pain in the ass.
But PostScript printing on my '80 Epson printwriter or my HP720c with
a Unix system with CUP is as easy as opening a browser, telling the
system I have a HP720c plugged to the parallel port and voilà.
And I can even share my HP720c.
P> We're back to configuring
T> Ghostscript, only this time on the Unix box where I have no doubt
T> it's even more painful than it is on a Windoze box, as well as
T> configuring a printer on a Unix box, itself a recurring nightmare
T> of mine for years now since one night in the nineties when I got
T> caught in the crossfire between someone's Epson inkjet and their
T> Mandrake 7.somethingorother Linux.
O poor boy. It was a job for someone else indeed.
In the same time I got an HP720c and it come with no other drivers
than Mac and Windows ones. I feared I was SOL when I readed of some
guy that wrote a small program that was able to convert certain gs
output to byte sequences good to pilot the HP720c.
It was *easy* to put this program in the pipeline in the "printer
driver" script.
And was *easy* insert a2ps to shoot plain text directly to the printer.
Before, I used an Epson pinwriter (24 pin head). Again, never had
problems (unless it was dead slow). On the other hand printing
directly some plain text under Windwos...
T> Reexamining that "find" line it looks like it tries to
T> automatically "lpr" the file(s) found.
Looks like ???? Hey, it doesn't look like, it's wat it's mean to do!
T> That is cause for concern,
T> since I can easily see something like this going into Sorceror's
T> Apprentice mode and costing you a fortune in ink and paper if
T> there's either a misspelling or other mistake (easy enough to make
T> in a complex arcane command line like that one) or more
T> "refcard.ps" matches than you expected there'd be in the target
T> directory and its descendants.
You are not one good for the computers, I see.
The good thing in bash is that I can use the history to recall a
command line. So you can first see what find finds, and then rerun the
program (search results get cached, so there's an incredible boost of
speed).
Second. When you learn how useful *is* find used that way, you *don't*
do the mispelling or other mistakes (as a smart person, you first do
the dryrun).
Ah, you'll start thinking that those who find find syntax arcane are
jackass... You need a little to realize it was not this easy in the
beginning. The dark side of power.
--
/\ ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
//--\| | \| | Integralista GNUslamico
\/ e coltivatore diretto di Software
A Cesare avrei detto di scrivermi a (e-mail address removed)
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.
T> [snipping some thinly-veiled insults and irrelevancies throughout]
T> Let me get this straight.
T> In this corner, we have just about every Windows application ever
T> developed. When a user needs help, a click on the "help" menu or
T> tap of the F1 key is all it takes to obtain some. Sometimes the
T> help is not of the greatest quality, but that is another issue we
T> won't concern ourselves with here.
Hmmm. I just activated the help hitting F1... WOHA, it says that if I
press k after F1 I get the description of what that key does...
T> In the other corner, we have just about every Unix application ever
T> developed. When a user needs help, they may do such things as
T> manually explore the directories where the application was
T> installed
Ever heard about the man command ? Is the first thing you learn to
do...
T> Or alternatively
T> it can just magically come to them as a divinely inspired insight,
If they are Windows user, I pity them, their brain could have been
damaged beyond repair.
They'll never be blessed by the idea that programs can do work for
them, and will bash restlessy their keyboard in antiquate sequences of
pre-automatic-controls tasks (as a reference, take a look to the
Metropolis movie)
T> or in a dream or a burning bush or stone tablets from heaven or
T> something, that something useful might happen if the unlikely
T> combination of symbols "find / -name refcard.ps -exec lpr {} \; 2>
T> /dev/null"
Nothing this divine. Just someone a bit more experienced than you are.
On the other hand I never seen such thing like a refcard, that's not
in the standard documentation system for such a modern toxic waste
like Word.
T> obviously never occur to them. Even if they knew the find tool and
T> its syntax, it would still have to somehow occur to them that
T> "refcard.ps" might be a useful search target.
Strange. I am *NOT* a native english speaker and I think my Q.I. tends
toward average from below, but refcard sound very useful to me, maybe
is short for "reference card" ?
T> came to shove, clicking Start->Search and putting in ".hlp" and
T> "C:\Program Files\Appname" would quickly find any help files.
I admit. find is less intuitive. But the stuff Windows comes with does
just that and nothing more. It will never suggest you that the long
boring task expecting you can be solved in a completely automatic
way with a little creative job.
T> most usually the help files would be named to end with
T> .hlp.
All, or that impaired of a O.S. could not understand they are help
files.
T> Moreover, once found, a quick double click and they're in a
T> hypertext browser viewing the help.
Emacs help was hypertextual when Dr. Watson plagued Windowd 3.11
users...
T> Unless I miss my guess,
T> refcard.ps would require mucking about installing and configuring
T> Ghostscript and GSView,
Splash, large miss.
You usually fire it to the local printer.
Uh, I understand. A Windows user could never have shared its HP720c
printer... Windows printer driver aren't known to be smart.
Not an Emacs flaw.
T> enough. Trying to read anything serious and navigate in GSView is
T> no picnic either.
A refcard, my dear, is something that goes on an A4/Letter sheet and
NEEDS NOT to be hypertextual.
T> Reader *might* be able to do more with a .ps file
With a PS file you can do just one thing, execute it. It's a program,
did you know ?
Ah, I never use Acroread. Xpdf does all the things really needed.
Uh, I forget. For Windows users getting a PDF out of a PS or HTML or
ASCII is not this easy unless they get some extra software (someone
ported CUPS to Windows ?). Again, not an Emacs fault.
T> On a Unix box, if you don't know exactly how to get
T> some app viewing a .ps file and how to navigate in it I'm guessing
T> you're SOL.
Stop guessing or all will know that all you know about Unix is that
is a 4 letter word, the first a capital U, the last an x.
On a Unix system either YOU are the sysadmin and know about all the
stuff you need to view, concot, print and bit-recycle PS files or
there's a sysadmin that did this for you. All with free (as in freedom)
stuff.
Most Unix users thinks that Word is a typewriter on steroids not worth
using due its poor output on paper, and are used to a typesetting
system that deals effortlessy with PS, PDF and so on. Uh, oh, Emacs
hypertextual manuals can be turned into a PS or PDF ready for a fine
professional printer...
T> The original suggestion with "lpr" implies printing it
T> rather than viewing it online, which a) costs money and b) requires
T> configuring a printer and a Postscript interpreter, given that
T> unless the printer cost more than the computer's CPU it surely
T> won't natively grok Postscript.
I will call you if I need some advice about cars. Maybe.
But not at all for computers.
refcard.ps is something you print and keep on a side when you start
using Emacs, as a REFERENCE for the key sequence, in the case you
forget some of them.
All the computer screen is devoted to your work, the sheet provides
some extra "real estate" for the help information, a sort of double
heading display. All you need to do is turn your eyes from the
monitor, maybe your eyes and read the informations. It coudl happen
that you need to flip the sheet. But you can keep both your work and
the help text "ready at your fingertips", and this is useful indeed:
you read the command keybinding, turn your eyes, type it and see the
result and/or continue your work.
Online viewing. Great deal.
Flip windows until you reach refcard. Read the command. Flip again
windows until you reach Emacs. Use the command (but you could have
forgot the key sequence - redo from start.
About money. Indeed ink/toner and paper costs. Electricity grows on
the spark tree so aboundant in our forests...
Configuring a printer. Yes you need to configure a printer. You need
it with Windows too. But if your Windows printer driver does not
handle PostScript (or if it does not let you share your printer) *now*
you are SOL. PostScript printing on a Windows system that does not
support PS is a pain in the ass.
But PostScript printing on my '80 Epson printwriter or my HP720c with
a Unix system with CUP is as easy as opening a browser, telling the
system I have a HP720c plugged to the parallel port and voilà.
And I can even share my HP720c.
P> We're back to configuring
T> Ghostscript, only this time on the Unix box where I have no doubt
T> it's even more painful than it is on a Windoze box, as well as
T> configuring a printer on a Unix box, itself a recurring nightmare
T> of mine for years now since one night in the nineties when I got
T> caught in the crossfire between someone's Epson inkjet and their
T> Mandrake 7.somethingorother Linux.
O poor boy. It was a job for someone else indeed.
In the same time I got an HP720c and it come with no other drivers
than Mac and Windows ones. I feared I was SOL when I readed of some
guy that wrote a small program that was able to convert certain gs
output to byte sequences good to pilot the HP720c.
It was *easy* to put this program in the pipeline in the "printer
driver" script.
And was *easy* insert a2ps to shoot plain text directly to the printer.
Before, I used an Epson pinwriter (24 pin head). Again, never had
problems (unless it was dead slow). On the other hand printing
directly some plain text under Windwos...
T> Reexamining that "find" line it looks like it tries to
T> automatically "lpr" the file(s) found.
Looks like ???? Hey, it doesn't look like, it's wat it's mean to do!
T> That is cause for concern,
T> since I can easily see something like this going into Sorceror's
T> Apprentice mode and costing you a fortune in ink and paper if
T> there's either a misspelling or other mistake (easy enough to make
T> in a complex arcane command line like that one) or more
T> "refcard.ps" matches than you expected there'd be in the target
T> directory and its descendants.
You are not one good for the computers, I see.
The good thing in bash is that I can use the history to recall a
command line. So you can first see what find finds, and then rerun the
program (search results get cached, so there's an incredible boost of
speed).
Second. When you learn how useful *is* find used that way, you *don't*
do the mispelling or other mistakes (as a smart person, you first do
the dryrun).
Ah, you'll start thinking that those who find find syntax arcane are
jackass... You need a little to realize it was not this easy in the
beginning. The dark side of power.
--
/\ ___
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____
//--\| | \| | Integralista GNUslamico
\/ e coltivatore diretto di Software
A Cesare avrei detto di scrivermi a (e-mail address removed)
B
Bent C Dalager
I am assuming, of course, that the local populace finds it more
opportune to try to communicate with you than to simply kill you on
the spot.
Foreign language exchange students provide a good example of this.
Armed imperialists in the african jungle do not.
Cheers
Bent D
B
Bjorn Borud
["Kjetil S. Matheussen" <[email protected]>]
|
| Did you expect something specific before starting to read that book?
| Thats a failure. SICP is a book you should read just for pure
| pleasure.
I was told by a lot of people I consider to be intelligent that this
book would change how I think about writing software. it didn't. I
didn't really know what to expect, but after reading it I did feel
that its importance was greatly exaggerated.
| > these people seemed to be
| > completely disconnected from reality.
|
| Please don't write things like that without backing it up with some
| reason.
well, for one, Scheme lacked proper libraries for doing everyday
things, so when I tried to use it I found myself writing a lot of
library code that I shouldn't have had to deal with. but it is quite
long ago, so things might have changed since then.
-Bjørn
|
| Did you expect something specific before starting to read that book?
| Thats a failure. SICP is a book you should read just for pure
| pleasure.
I was told by a lot of people I consider to be intelligent that this
book would change how I think about writing software. it didn't. I
didn't really know what to expect, but after reading it I did feel
that its importance was greatly exaggerated.
| > these people seemed to be
| > completely disconnected from reality.
|
| Please don't write things like that without backing it up with some
| reason.
well, for one, Scheme lacked proper libraries for doing everyday
things, so when I tried to use it I found myself writing a lot of
library code that I shouldn't have had to deal with. but it is quite
long ago, so things might have changed since then.
-Bjørn
B
Bjorn Borud
[Twisted <[email protected]>]
|
| Some people might say the same thing about emacs. A lot of unix tools
| even. "Stubbornly insisting on being odd" appears to be a particularly
| prevalent character flaw among the geeknoscenti.
I think you are missing the point. you may find Emacs (and UNIX) to
be odd, and you consistently parade this around as a reason not to
even make an honest attempt at understanding how to use it (them). if
the oddness still eclipses usefulness once you've made a proper
attempt at understanding a tool, then the oddness is a problem. Emacs
(and UNIX) don't exhibit these characteristics for a great number of
people.
-Bjørn
|
| Some people might say the same thing about emacs. A lot of unix tools
| even. "Stubbornly insisting on being odd" appears to be a particularly
| prevalent character flaw among the geeknoscenti.
I think you are missing the point. you may find Emacs (and UNIX) to
be odd, and you consistently parade this around as a reason not to
even make an honest attempt at understanding how to use it (them). if
the oddness still eclipses usefulness once you've made a proper
attempt at understanding a tool, then the oddness is a problem. Emacs
(and UNIX) don't exhibit these characteristics for a great number of
people.
-Bjørn