Invisible escreveu:
>> I look at the text, not the window furniture. (I don't care much for 
>> the M$
>> window furniture anyway, but I definitely appear to be in a minority 
>> there ;-))
> 
> OK. But it would be nice if the text itself was crisp and readable, no?

Anti-aliasing means blur.  No AA means crisp. ;)

Anyway, if you go "emacs -nw" on a console, you may entirely drop the 
ancient GUI and use it on the console, which may pretty well mean having 
the AA fonts from your terminal setting, like in gnome-console.

>>> I mean, if you're forced to use a console window to do something, then
>>> fair enough. But this is 2009. We have graphics systems capable of
>>> better. Why not make use of that fact?

XEmacs took that route of embracing GUIs and their lifestyle.  It means 
there's tons of buttons and tons of menus inside menus without end. 
GUIs work when you have limited software like notepad.  When you have 
tons of features like Emacs and IDEs, all those buttons begin to get in 
the way.  Ever looked into Eclipse?

>> Because it's not relevant? Most people who would benefit from using 
>> something
>> like emacs probably don't give a monkeys about how it looks.
> 
> Funny, each time I set up SciTE, the first thing I do is change *all* 
> the fonts to monospace, and then fiddle with the sizing so it's 
> appropriate for the resolution of monitor I'm using (and how far away 
> I'm sat). And then I turn on the line numbering. And line wrapping. (The 
> kind where it shows you where the wrapped lines are, not the kind where 
> it actually inserts newline characters.)
> 
> Being stuck with one ugly terminal font would just annoy me.
> 
>> In any case, I think
>> a black background and fixed-width text is much more suitable for 
>> programming
>> than a wysiwyg word processor.
> 
> No sensible person programs with a word processor. It's the wrong tool. 

Yet I've seen coworkers typing SQL in Word.  Yes, it's insane and 
depressing.

> But there are studies that show that black-on-white is easier to read 
> than white-on-black, and I'd prefer to be able to change it.

I enjoy cyan-on-black more. :)

> 
>>>> C = ctrl
>>> So "C-u" actually means "Ctrl+U"?
>>
>> Aye. Again, I think it's just an old notation.
> 
> OK, fair enough.
> 
> By the way... what kind of keyboard actually has a Meta key?

In modern PC keyboards it binds to Alt.

For historical reasons, Meta is maintained despite being a key only 
existing in ancient computer keyboards.  Emacs is from that era and 
despite evolving through the years, still uses ancient terminology, like 
buffers instead of tabs.

Anyway, without Meta, the emacs command M-x would lose it's meaning. ;)

> Emacs is a Lisp interpretter running a text editor application written 
> in Lisp. If you just want to change some setting, you can probably get 
> away with adjusting a variable. But if you want to alter something there 
> isn't a setting for... you need to modify the source code.

Which is in Lisp.  Not only variables, you can add hooks too. :)

> seems Warp has done this.) The similarity is that, like SciTE, it'll 
> take you hours to figure out which secret hidden setting changes the 
> thing that's annoying you. (Or even whether there *is* a setting to 
> change a particular behaviour...)

Small baby steps on the manual over a few months can do wonders.  Over 
the years and you get a new Emacs guru. :)

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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