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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