NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/comp/sys/amiga/programm/11632

Internet Message Format | 1992-07-25 | 3.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!decwrl!contessa!mwm
From: [e-mail] (Mike Meyer)
Subject: Re: GNU Emacs vs. the world . . . (was Re: C Programmer's Editor of Choice?)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Distribution: world
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
X-NewsSoftware: Amiga Yarn 2.0, 1992/06/25 01:41:36
Keywords:
Summary:
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 25 Jul 92 04:47:22 PST
Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica
Lines: 66

In <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Abel Chow ~) wrote:
> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Mike Meyer) writes:
>
> > In <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Abel Chow ~) wrote:
> > > I'm wondering how many Amiga users have actually used GNU Emacs.  I
> >
> > GNU Emacs is a subset of Emacs, not the whole thing. A fair number of
>
> Hi, Mike.  Actually, it's more like the people who C-f all the way to
> the end of the line rather than using a single C-e, or C-k a whole
> bunch of blank lines instead of C-x C-o, or C-f character by character
> instead of M-f, or C-d C-f <char> instead of C-t, etc.  <cringe> It
> just drives me up a wall watching people edit in such a fashion.

Those are just "finger training". For instance, I almost never use C-x
C-o, because it wasn't in the first few Emacs-like editors I used
(CCA, Goslings and Scribe; all years before GNU existed). My fingers
know C-space M-f M-b C-w as "delete a large chunk of whitespace". C-t
is one of the things that changes *most*.  There are at least four
different ways to do that: exchange around/in-front-of point, and
whether the cursor moves. As a result, I quickly stop using it on
anything that doesn't act like GNU emacs, even if it's there. If
someone grew up with an "arrow key" editor, I can even see why they'd
do C-f to move around out of habit.

I once caught someone doing something I thought was silly (multiple
M-f's instead of M-<digit> M-f), and asked them about it. They hadn't
even thought about it; they had thought "I need the cursor there", and
there fingers did the rest. Nuts, I can't tell you the sequence I just
type to position the cursor.  That's what finger training is all about
- you get your mind out of the loop. Breaking such training is *hard*.

> To be totally honest, I haven't met anyone at school or at work who
> knows Emacs well (OK, I'm young . . . I'll wait a couple more years).
> <sigh> And it all began when the place where I worked had only the raw
> Unix system and one text editor--vi . . .

Wanna get really grossed out? I still use ed and ex regularly. I can
make a one-line change to a file faster than most visual editors can
repaint the screen (or half, if you're using emacsclient). People
who've never used line editors just can't understand how I can work
"blind". But that's the fastest way. And it also means I don't have any
trouble doing batch edits with sed and/or ed.

> > Update? What were you going to add? I use MG regularly on the latest
>
> Actually, I was trying to make it work correctly on 2.0 (and use as
> many 2.0 features as possible).  I wanted to just get rid of the
> cosmetic problems first, but I never got that far.  Unless you stick
> to 8 pixel high fonts, the window graphics is messed up.  The menus
> don't work with proportional spaced fonts.  The system font is used
> instead of the screen font.  Stuff like that.

Yeah, I noticed most of that stuff. There are some other minor bugs.
Using the screen font is correct; if you enable the font selection
software, you'll find it doesn't work with proportional fonts.

One of these days, I'll get around to buying some extra ram (it's not
that I don't have enough to run GNU; it's that I'm having problems
with scheme compiles and mg) and rework my world to use that. I'll
officially annouce the death of the mg project then...

    <mike