>> What is it, exactly, that makes Emacs so fantastic? What does it
>> actually *do* beyond being a text editor?
> 
> Lots. But its household name is historical, goes back to the dark ages of
> computing. There are dozens of quite decent free text editors nowadays.

OK, I can kind of see that. Way back in the dark ages, when text files 
were generated by having a professional typist type it onto punch cards, 
where people operated computers using monochrome dumb terminals 
connected to a mainframe, and where the only way to operate on a text 
file was edlin, I can imagine Emacs causing a stir. Everybody uses edlin 
to painfully crawl through a file one line at a time, and then suddenly 
this thing comes along with realtime interactive full-screen text 
editing, scrolling and multiple windows in its text-based UI, 
sophsticated facilities such as find and replace that previously 
required complicated shell scripting, and all completely customisable 
using a high-end interpretted scripting language called Lisp. It must 
have seemed so futuristic back then.

It just seems to me that now almost everything Emacs does can also be 
done by half a dozen other tools - most of which don't require you to 
memorise long sequences of keyboard acrobatics to do things. So while I 
get that Emacs seemed amazing 30 years ago, why do people still use it 
today?

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>> emacs is a religion.  Notepad isn't.
I've been using Notepad++ lately, it seems OK.
It has context highlighting for a bunch of languages.
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Didn't mice and pull-down menus make 
Emacs obsolete?

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Screenshots don't show functionality.
>
> No, but they do show me that the UI looks utterly horrid.

It does strike me as a little odd to criticise emacs for having an ugly UI... I
realise that visual icing sells products, but you wouldn't complain that a
command shell has an ugly UI. It's like not buying a car because you don't like
the layout of the engine bay.

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

C = ctrl

> 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...

Well, I've been using it at work for about 6 months, and while I've not really
altered it from our default config I am starting to like it. It's main
advantage as far as I can see is the degree to which it can be customised -
basically, you can build your own text editor based on what commands/keystrokes
you prefer to work with.

I must have a pick over Warp's comprehensive and most useful-looking config
file... :-)

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>>> Screenshots don't show functionality.
>> No, but they do show me that the UI looks utterly horrid.
> 
> It does strike me as a little odd to criticise emacs for having an ugly UI... I
> realise that visual icing sells products, but you wouldn't complain that a
> command shell has an ugly UI. It's like not buying a car because you don't like
> the layout of the engine bay.

If you're going to spend hours of your life staring at something, 
wouldn't you like it to look nice?

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?

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

So "C-u" actually means "Ctrl+U"?

>> 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...
> 
> Well, I've been using it at work for about 6 months, and while I've not really
> altered it from our default config I am starting to like it. It's main
> advantage as far as I can see is the degree to which it can be customised -
> basically, you can build your own text editor based on what commands/keystrokes
> you prefer to work with.

Well, I don't know. SciTE is open-source. If you want to, it's perfectly 
possible to download the source code and modify it. But let's face it, 
who the hell is going to do that? Nobody. Similarly, Emacs lets you 
change absolutely anything [with the not inconsiderable detail that you 
don't have to recompile anything]. But only once you've read and 
memorised the entire source tree. How feasible is that, really?

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Invisible schrieb:
> 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. 

jEdit can do that.

My 2 eurocents,

Bonsai

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> 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.

The Windows POV editor allows you to do that stuff, as does TextPad and the 
MSVS IDE editor, in fact pretty much any editor I've tried that isn't 
notepad allows this.

The standard seems to be to hold down Alt while dragging out a selection 
rectangle, then when you type (or hit backspace) it does that action to 
every line in the selection.  Try it in POV to see how it works.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> If you're going to spend hours of your life staring at something,
> wouldn't you like it to look nice?

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 ;-))

> 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?

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. Why would I want
my socket spanners to look suitable for a mantelpiece? :-) In any case, I think
a black background and fixed-width text is much more suitable for programming
than a wysiwyg word processor.

> > C = ctrl
>
> So "C-u" actually means "Ctrl+U"?

Aye. Again, I think it's just an old notation.

> Well, I don't know. SciTE is open-source. If you want to, it's perfectly
> possible to download the source code and modify it. But let's face it,
> who the hell is going to do that? Nobody.

What's that got to do with it? I may be a new user, but even I can see that
customising emacs is nothing like editing its source code.

> Similarly, Emacs lets you
> change absolutely anything [with the not inconsiderable detail that you
> don't have to recompile anything]. But only once you've read and
> memorised the entire source tree. How feasible is that, really?

Not at all, if it were true. Did you not glance over Warp's config file? Seems
fairly self evident, I don't know any of these configuration keywords from
memory but I'll certainly be swiping some of them for my config file in future.
If you want the extra flexibility but don't like the ancient shortcut standards,
just change them to what everyone uses now. That's what Warp did.

I'm not saying learning to use something like emacs isn't daunting - I probably
wouldn't use it myself if we didn't have it here. But you should watch a power
user navigating code libraries and running external commands. It's like a movie
scene, where single keystrokes don't seem to match up with what's happening
on-screen. (Like Scotty bringing up a 3D model of transparent aluminium in 4
seconds work - name that movie!)

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>> If you're going to spend hours of your life staring at something,
>> wouldn't you like it to look nice?
> 
> 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?

>> 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?
> 
> 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. 
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.

>>> 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?

>> Well, I don't know. SciTE is open-source. If you want to, it's perfectly
>> possible to download the source code and modify it. But let's face it,
>> who the hell is going to do that? Nobody.
> 
> What's that got to do with it? I may be a new user, but even I can see that
> customising emacs is nothing like editing its source code.

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.

>> Similarly, Emacs lets you
>> change absolutely anything [with the not inconsiderable detail that you
>> don't have to recompile anything]. But only once you've read and
>> memorised the entire source tree. How feasible is that, really?
> 
> Not at all, if it were true. Did you not glance over Warp's config file? Seems
> fairly self evident, I don't know any of these configuration keywords from
> memory but I'll certainly be swiping some of them for my config file in future.
> If you want the extra flexibility but don't like the ancient shortcut standards,
> just change them to what everyone uses now. That's what Warp did.

On some level, it's similar to how you configure SciTE - i.e., with a 
giant text file. The difference with Emacs is that you can write complex 
blobs of arbitrary executable code to define new functionallity. (It 
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...)

> I'm not saying learning to use something like emacs isn't daunting - I probably
> wouldn't use it myself if we didn't have it here. But you should watch a power
> user navigating code libraries and running external commands. It's like a movie
> scene, where single keystrokes don't seem to match up with what's happening
> on-screen. (Like Scotty bringing up a 3D model of transparent aluminium in 4
> seconds work - name that movie!)

I don't know the title. Whichever Star Trek movie it was that featured 
time travel.

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Bill Pragnell wrote:

> I'm not saying learning to use something like emacs isn't daunting - I probably
> wouldn't use it myself if we didn't have it here. But you should watch a power
> user navigating code libraries and running external commands. It's like a movie
> scene, where single keystrokes don't seem to match up with what's happening
> on-screen.

Heh. I always thought it would be fun to design a computer system that 
actually works that way. Apparently there's prior art...

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Invisible wrote:
...
>>> 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?

Control-u 10 Control-f


C-u  = universal-argument
C-f  = forward-char

-- 
Tor Olav
http://subcube.com

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