Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> My goal here is not really to prove that Notepad is better than Emacs -
> Notepad is obviously inferior to just about every editor known to man.

	Yeah. It sucked when Notepad took the market away from EDLIN.

-- 
Nick Mackey saying hello.


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                       >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                   anl

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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Notepad is obviously inferior to just about every editor known to man. 
> 
>   You have clearly never used edlin.

	Darn - beat me to it!

-- 
Nick Mackey saying hello.


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                       >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                   anl

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nemesis wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:40:54 +0100, Invisible wrote:
>>
>>> So what is it that Emacs does
>>> that's so awesom? What can it do that Notepad can't?
>>
>> emacs is a religion.  Notepad isn't.
> 
> Yes, emacs can move mountains. ;)

M-x translate-mountain

-- 
Nick Mackey saying hello.


                    /\  /\               /\  /
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                       >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                   anl

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>  So in your opinion people who have been using emacs in a unix system
> for 20 years have no right to use the same software in the exact same
> way in Windows?

A simple option to choose between Windows and traditional Unix interfaces 
would suffice (the default of course being Windows so that new users don't 
get scared off).

Anyway, Windows is not Unix, if you port a program from another platform to 
Windows you should at least have to use the standard Windows GUI controls 
and keyboard shortcuts.  One thing that is good about *most* Windows apps is 
that they all work the same way, Ctrl-C is copy, Ctrl-S is save, they all 
use the same Windows dialog boxes, that makes it *easy* to learn and use. 
Programs that deliberately don't conform to these standards are just 
shooting themselves in the foot because users won't like them.

Look at how many people complain about the UI of Blender and what a steep 
learning curve it has.  Do you think it would be as bad if the Windows 
version actually looked and behaved like a proper Windows application? 
Pressing Space to get the context menu and right button to select, using 
some file open/save mechanism from the DOS ages, using Ctrl-W to save, WTF 
is that about? - it's a horrendous application running on Windows in terms 
of the UI.

>  Btw, saying "I tried emacs once and gave up" is exactly as stupid as
> saying "I tried povray once and gave up".

I think it's the expectation thing, you don't expect to be able to load up a 
script-based ray tracer and just get it to work on your first try with no 
documentation.  A text editor however, you expect to be able to type stuff, 
copy & paste, load save etc without having to read any documentation because 
there are OS standardised ways for that stuff for a reason.

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>> Really, I wish MS would ban software that doesn't at least use the 
>> standard font, menus, toolbars, dialogs etc.
>
> Emacs and vi were around long before Microsoft began selling DOS.  Their 
> standards are as valid in their context as Microsoft's in their products.

Sure, but if you write or port a program to run under windows it should 
follow at least some basic style guidelines.  IIRC they are on the MS 
website somewhere under their "logo program".  It makes life easier for 
everyone using that OS, rather than ending up with a mish-mash of programs 
all doing everything their own way.

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>> My God... The Windows native port is a 37 MB download! O_O
> 
> 	They have a Windows port?

It's GNU software. They quite often have Windows ports. Some of them 
don't even require an emulator.

>> Does anybody know what the hell "C-u 10 C-f" is actually supposed to
>> mean?
> 
> 	I believe it means to do C-f many, many times. Don't know for sure as
> I'm not (yet) a real emacs user.

No no, I mean... HOW DO YOU TYPE THAT? What keys is it actually talking 
about?

> 	As for kill and yank, do realize that Emacs is old. I'm not sure cut
> and paste was common editor parlance in those days.

Fair enough. But... pretty strange choice of terms, even if nothing 
existed before.

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>> Does anybody know what the hell "C-u 10 C-f" is actually supposed to 
>> mean? What the heck is a "meta key"? Why are cut and past called kill 
>> and yank? The list of questions goes on and on.
> 
> which does which? Kill I imagine deletes the text. Yank I guess is 
> similar to a copy then delete operation.

Actually, it appears that kill = cut and yank = paste. (WTF?)

> I'm sure there's a way to remap keyboard operations.

I'm pretty sure you're right.

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>> My God... The Windows native port is a 37 MB download! O_O
>>
>> *dies*
>>
>> I thought SciTE was bad for taking almost 2 MB, but 37 MB for a mere 
>> text editor?
> 
> Emacs/vi + 
> Unix command-line is pretty much a textual IDE, not mere editor -- the 
> size is even light in the face of graphical IDEs.  Plus the editor 
> component is far more featureful than most IDE's editing component.

OK, fair enough.

>> Not content with merely being a text editor, it also tries to be a 
>> newsreader, web browser, file manager, calendar, and even a Tetris 
>> clone. Unfortunately, from the screenshots I've seen, it does none of 
>> these things very well.
> 
> Screenshots don't show functionality.

No, but they do show me that the UI looks utterly horrid.

> Emacs/Unix looks ugly and performs like an athlete.  Notepad/Windows 
> looks shiny and performs like a snail.  Hey, if you get a Mac you can 
> have awesome visuals + Unix featureful command-line apps.  Best of 2 
> worlds! :-D

Heh. So people keep telling me. Pity about the price tag...

(I just bought a shiny new Intel Core 2 Duo laptop. I did look at a 
MacBook, but couldn't find anything for anywhere near the price I paid. 
And all the MacBooks seem to have utterly horrid keyboards...)

>> Does anybody know what the hell "C-u 10 C-f" is actually supposed to 
>> mean?
> 
> RTFM?

Have you seen the size of it?

> C-u 10 (do next command 10 times)
> C-f (moves the text cursor (f)orward by 1 char)

Er, no... HOW DO YOU TYPE THAT? What buttons is it actually telling you 
to press?

> Hmm, I think I've made my case for these features here before and didn't 
> make your mind then, won't be trying it again... you should try to learn 
> and actually practice it to see what you was losing all these years 
> rather than ask for features and then just rebating and turning such 
> features down on such silly arguments as beauty or other non-sense. 
> Looks alone don't mean squat for powerful text editing.

A lot of people like Emacs. There must be a reason for that. I'm curios 
to know what it is.

A found a blog where somebody asked this very question. A lot of the 
answers were things like "it does syntax hilighting" (well, so does 
everything now), "you can open a shell from the same window" (well, Kate 
does that), and "it's what I've used for years" / "it works the same way 
on every platform".

About the most convincing justification I could find was "it has 
millions of tiny features that together add up to something special". Of 
course, you'd have to use it for 20 years to find out of that's actually 
true or not...

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>>> emacs is a religion.  Notepad isn't.
>> Yes, emacs can move mountains. ;)
> 
> M-x translate-mountain

That would be funny if you weren't joking... ;-)

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>>> Ported to many platforms
>>
>> SciTE runs on both Windows and Linux, and that's all I need.
> 
> Ah, yes, the old and tired it-fits-my-purpose argument.  Aunt Jemima 
> pulls it around everytime to show how Notepad is just the same as Emacs 
> or vim.

I'm just trying to figure out whether Emacs does anything that SciTE 
doesn't which will be useful to me, that's all.

>>> Internationalization
>>
>> Not important to me.
> 
> Yeah, surely not important at all, except perhaps for the 3 billions of 
> Indians and Chinese plus another billions of people who don't speak 
> English.

I didn't say it's not important to them, I said it's not important to 
*me*. Different thing.

>>> Many editing modes
>>
>> ...and?
> 
> Well, for once it means you may edit Haskell with far more ease than 
> with simple syntax highlighting.  If you RTFM for that mode, that is.

By pure coincidence, some people have just been debating this very 
thing. Apparently the existing Haskell major mode works quite well, but 
indentation doesn't work right.

>>> Self documenting with built in tutorial
>>> Detailed and well written manuals
>>
>> Nice, but secondary. It's good to know a tool is easy to learn, but 
>> the question is whether it's *worth* learning in the first place.
> 
> When you finally see the light and understand it's well worth, it's 
> there for you and you won't bother to bash yet another open-source 
> project for lack of documentation.

I wonder if this is like "seeing the light" about Lisp. People claim 
that learning Lisp will transform your life. Personally, I found it did 
no such thing...

>>> AFAIK notepad is/has none of the above.
>>
>> Agreed. Notepad fails in many, many basic ways. But SciTE is quite 
>> nice in general.
> 
> Yes, SciTE is a wonderful editor.  Even being a helluva less powerful 
> than emacs or vim.

Well, SciTE isn't perfect, for sure. It's a PITA to configure the thing, 
and there are certain things you just can't get it to do right. But 
overall, it's a damn site nicer than Notepad.

> It's worth learning for no other reason than most open-source language 
> implementations out there have at the very least a very handy 
> language-mode available for Emacs which quickly turn it into a quite 
> featureful customized IDE for said language.

So you're saying it's the network effect - because so many people use 
it, a lot of useful code is developed for it?

> Then, there are also incredibly powerful and handy general purpose text 
> editing features that once you learn to use you'll ask yourself how 
> you've lost so many unproductive years of your life in lesser editors. 
> Like copy-paste cyclic buffer, keyboard macros for performing repetitive 
> tasks, quick jumping between visited points in the text (like automatic 
> bookmarks everytime you jump around in the text), sessions, editor 
> customized to suit language needs and many others.  SciTE (or kate) 
> simply still not there at all.

Now, see, that all sounds very nice. But SciTE and Kate both have 
sessions, and I never use them. (Indeed, it would annoy me to open up a 
new editor window and get the files I was working on last time.) Several 
programs have a clipboard that can store multiple items, and again I 
never use it. Having marks sounds useful, but I suspect in practice it's 
far too fiddly to figure out which mark you're trying to jump to. These 
things all *sound* useful, but in practice probably too hard to use.

Let's face it, every text editor on Earth worthy of the name has cursor 
movement. And yet, when I type a sentence and realise I made a mistake 
typing it, rather than just move the cursor to where the mistake is, 
it's often simpler to just hold down the backspace key and delete up to 
where the mistake was, and then retype everything after that. If I don't 
use such a basic feature as cursor keys, how much am I going to use a 
cyclic undo buffer?

One feature I actually *want* and that no known editor seems to have is 
the ability to do stuff to tabular data easily. Like, if you suddenly 
decide that you need to append the same piece of text to all 10 lines. 
Or you have a grid of numbers, and you want to add another column in the 
middle. Or stuff like that. Since Emacs == Lisp, it seems that you could 
probably spend 20 minutes writing some code that would do what you want. 
(And, indeed, potentially you could even generate text algorithmically, 
although I don't know how hard that is...)

> Couple emacs and vim with exuberant-ctags (an external tool supporting 
> many languages) and you turn your text editor into an almost as good IDE 
> for handling large projects and many files.

Playing devil's advocate: Why use something "almost as good as an IDE" 
when you can use an actual IDE?

> First thing to do either in emacs or vim is to run the interactive 
> tutorials.  In about 30 minutes, it'll cover the basics and give you a 
> good overall sense of what it is and how to use the powerful tool. Then, 
> getting help on specific subjects of current interest.

Maybe I will, just for giggles...

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