So I'm trying to figure out whether I want to use standard Emacs Lisp mode,
ILISP, or SLIME. Can sombody give me an opinion or two on each of these...?
What are the major differences?
-- Dave
Dave Roberts <·····@re-move.droberts.com> writes:
> So I'm trying to figure out whether I want to use standard Emacs Lisp mode,
> ILISP, or SLIME. Can sombody give me an opinion or two on each of these...?
> What are the major differences?
You may take a look at http://home.comcast.net/~b.clementson/ilc_2003.htm
On this site Bill Clementson gives an introduction on "Using Emacs as
a Lisp IDE" and compares Inferior Lisp Mode, ILISP and ELI (Emacs-Lisp
Interface).
In article <······················@attbi_s03>, Dave Roberts
<·····@re-move.droberts.com> wrote:
> So I'm trying to figure out whether I want to use standard Emacs Lisp mode,
> ILISP, or SLIME. Can sombody give me an opinion or two on each of these...?
> What are the major differences?
I note you left out one option there, ELI for both Allegro and
SBCL/x86. I'll break them all down here:
* Inferior Lisp mode: primitive, comint-based, no special support for
anything at all. Works great with lisp500.
* ILISP: The old mode of choice adds many features above bare inferior
lisp mode but is still comint-based, meaning it gets highly confused
for certain types of terminal interactions. No support for anything
like threads. Portable to Schemes too. Hard to maintain and bugfix.
* ELI: Franz's lisp mode is also ported to SBCL. Socket-based, support
for threads, great if you can use it.
* SLIME: A new socket-based mode is much more reliable and much easier
to hack than ILISP. No support for threads yet, but multiple
connections are supported (which is a small workaround for threads).
Works on many implementations.
Of the above I would prefer SLIME, except on Allegro where I would
prefer ELI. On SBCL/x86 it's a toss-up between SLIME and ELI. I don't
see a reason to use ILISP any more.
--
Brian Mastenbrook
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~bmastenb/
Brian Mastenbrook <····················@cs.indiana.edu> writes:
> Of the above I would prefer SLIME, except on Allegro where I would
> prefer ELI. On SBCL/x86 it's a toss-up between SLIME and ELI. I don't
> see a reason to use ILISP any more.
One thing going for ilisp is that it's quite easy to adapt to new CL
implementations. I use it with ArmedBear Lisp, and I'm quite happy with
it. Of course I'll switch to slime as soon as ABL becomes slime
capable.
Andras
Dave Roberts <·····@re-move.droberts.com> writes:
> So I'm trying to figure out whether I want to use standard Emacs Lisp mode,
> ILISP, or SLIME. Can sombody give me an opinion or two on each of these...?
> What are the major differences?
SLIME definitely. It's an amazing major-mode. Few bugs and evolving
very fast.
--
Frederic Brunel
In article <······················@attbi_s03>,
Dave Roberts <·····@re-move.droberts.com> wrote:
>So I'm trying to figure out whether I want to use standard Emacs Lisp mode,
>ILISP, or SLIME. Can sombody give me an opinion or two on each of these...?
>What are the major differences?
I found SLIME to work better than ILISP with xemacs at least.
However, I found Jabberwocky to be much slicker and work better than anything to
do with emacs.
http://jabberwocky.sourceforge.net/
Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
-Lupo
Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time. <··@io.com>
On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 03:19:44PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
> Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
> M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
The hands of a *real programmer* never leave the keyboard. :-P
And with the nice command-completion that emacs has, it is very easy to
type and figure out the name of the commands. If that fails, there is
always apropos.
And what self-respecting programmer could use something written in Java,
anyway?
--
; Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu>
; OpenPGP public key: C24B6010 on keyring.debian.org
; Signed or encrypted mail welcome.
; "There is no dark side of the moon really; matter of fact, it's all dark."
Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
> On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 03:19:44PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
> > Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
> > M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
>
> The hands of a *real programmer* never leave the keyboard. :-P
Except on occasion. Most of the time, you just hack away, but
sometimes to invoke occasional behavior that you don't have easily
keyboard accesible. In that case, you can use a mouse-driven menu, or...
> And with the nice command-completion that emacs has, it is very easy to
> type and figure out the name of the commands. If that fails, there is
> always apropos.
Yeah, use M-x foo<TAB>. Emacs supports both. I'm a fan of both.
Sometimes, the best way to find something is by looking through lists
sorted by category. Usually, I know about what I want to say, tho.
The *good* thing about the Emacs approach is that it fits nicely with
Lisp. Everything is a function, and you can bind most anything to
functions, or invoke them directly. This applies to *all* Emacses,
too, not just X- and GNU-, but Fred (MCL), and Hemlock and its
derivatives.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
In article <·····················@mapcar.org>,
Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 03:19:44PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
>> Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
>> M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
>
>The hands of a *real programmer* never leave the keyboard. :-P
>
>And with the nice command-completion that emacs has, it is very easy to
>type and figure out the name of the commands. If that fails, there is
>always apropos.
So, like none of you unutterable bozos have actually *used* Jabberwocky, have
you?
I have had the benefit of having 10 years of experience using emacs derivatives
for a programming environment and editor (and 3 months of using xemacs as such
with Lisp). Emacs is fine. I prefer it to most things I've been exposed to for
hacking code (I want to like xjed better, but I can't).
However, Jabberwocky is *better* -it is not trivially better: it is lots better.
Jabberwocky is so much better, it's not even really comparable. My main
complaint is that it is slower.
What is more, it works out of the friggin' box, which is what a programming
tool *should* do.
If you don't believe me; go have a look for yourself. But don't be flappin' yer
yap about a tool you've never bothered to look at, simply because you've
dedicated your life to what is obviously (to anyone with an imagination) a
fairly shitty text editor.
If it were up to people like you, I'd be sending my lisp code to the computer
with a friggin' telegraph key.
>And what self-respecting programmer could use something written in Java,
>anyway?
Who you calling a programmer, code monkey? I'm a physicist, and I'm not
particularly religious about *using* something written in Java; just religious
about writing something in Java.
As I said, the fact that it wasn't written in McCLIM or something really says
something, since it's one of the best Lisp tools I've yet used.
-Lupo
"If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the
War, it's workshop."-Kingsley Amis <··@io.com>
··@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) writes:
> In article <·····················@mapcar.org>,
> Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 03:19:44PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
> >> Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
> >> M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
> >
> >The hands of a *real programmer* never leave the keyboard. :-P
> >
> >And with the nice command-completion that emacs has, it is very easy to
> >type and figure out the name of the commands. If that fails, there is
> >always apropos.
>
> So, like none of you unutterable bozos have actually *used* Jabberwocky, have
> you?
Wow, with such a measured, unemotional, nonabusive, informative
recommendation as this, I'm jumping at the thought of trying those
great advantages you mentioned. Oh wait, you didn't mention any, did
you particle-monkey?
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> Wow, with such a measured, unemotional, nonabusive, informative
> recommendation as this, I'm jumping at the thought of trying those
> great advantages you mentioned. Oh wait, you didn't mention any, did
> you particle-monkey?
I'm trying Jabberwocky right now and find it very interesting.
Elsewhere I had some problems during installation, and yes, while using, it
seems to be slow.
I have still not tested it fully to say that it hungs.
I'm still trying to install ilisp for my emacs, so I can compare them.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> ···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
>
>
> > Wow, with such a measured, unemotional, nonabusive, informative
> > recommendation as this, I'm jumping at the thought of trying those
> > great advantages you mentioned. Oh wait, you didn't mention any, did
> > you particle-monkey?
>
> I'm trying Jabberwocky right now and find it very interesting.
From its webpage, it sounds like a reasonable IDE. Its listed
features don't sound very different from what's available from Emacs,
but some people might want a more conventional IDE setup.
> Elsewhere I had some problems during installation, and yes, while using, it
> seems to be slow.
> I have still not tested it fully to say that it hungs.
And it looks really ugly. But I'm sure you can turn off color
highlighting, and I wouldn't be surprised if it looked better and ran
faster under Mac OS X.
> I'm still trying to install ilisp for my emacs, so I can compare them.
I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
Thomas F. Burdick wrote:
>>I'm still trying to install ilisp for my emacs, so I can compare them.
>
> I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
Where can I get it? What is its home page?
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Thomas F. Burdick wrote:
>
> >>I'm still trying to install ilisp for my emacs, so I can compare them.
> >
> > I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
>
> Where can I get it? What is its home page?
http://www.common-lisp.net/project/slime/
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 23:44:04 +0100, javuchi <······@nospam.com> wrote:
> Thomas F. Burdick wrote:
>
>> I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
>
> Where can I get it? What is its home page?
Have you heard about this marvellous new thing called "Google"?
Edi.
Edi Weitz wrote:
>>>I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
>>
>>Where can I get it? What is its home page?
>
>
> Have you heard about this marvellous new thing called "Google"?
I just got a lot of non-valid pages not showing me the main page of the
program. This is because I made my question, didn't you figured that?
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Edi Weitz wrote:
>
> >>>I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
> >>
> >>Where can I get it? What is its home page?
> >
> >
> > Have you heard about this marvellous new thing called "Google"?
SLIME moved fairly recently from sourceforge to common-lisp.net
> I just got a lot of non-valid pages not showing me the main page of the
> program. This is because I made my question, didn't you figured that?
In case you don't know, CLiki is a good place to start searching for
anything having to do with open source common lisp. The second hit
for "slime emacs" is a cliki link :-)
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
On 07 Feb 2004 18:10:06 -0800, ···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) wrote:
> SLIME moved fairly recently from sourceforge to common-lisp.net
Yep, but Google already knows that.
On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 02:54:17 +0100, javuchi <······@nospam.com> wrote:
> Edi Weitz wrote:
>
>>>>I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
>>>
>>>Where can I get it? What is its home page?
>> Have you heard about this marvellous new thing called "Google"?
>
> I just got a lot of non-valid pages not showing me the main page of
> the program. This is because I made my question, didn't you figured
> that?
No, I figured you want others to do the work for you. Searching for
"SLIME" in Google reveals the correct result as the sixth entry. You
don't need to be a genius to see that the five entries which are
ranked higher have nothing to do with Lisp or Emacs without even
looking at them.
Edi.
Edi Weitz wrote:
>>I just got a lot of non-valid pages not showing me the main page of
>>the program. This is because I made my question, didn't you figured
>>that?
>
>
> No, I figured you want others to do the work for you.
Writing this message will be probably slower than finding it in Google,
as long as you know how to search it.
> Searching for
> "SLIME" in Google reveals the correct result as the sixth entry. You
> don't need to be a genius to see that the five entries which are
> ranked higher have nothing to do with Lisp or Emacs without even
> looking at them.
I figured out that the correct keywords would be "slime lisp", not just
"slime", so I didn't get a correct response from google. Just my error,
everyone gots one sometimes, or even lots of them everytime, we are
humans. I think I didn't have a correct response from your part. You can
say the same thing being more friendly. There is no need to be so agressive.
Have a nice day, Edi.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> You can say the same thing being more friendly.
Hardly.
> There is no need to be so agressive.
Just because someone writes what he means, doesn't mean he's
agressive. Edi wasn't being agressive at all. He was, perhaps, a bit
blunt. People (at least I) tend to be a bit short when people behave
the way you did.
(I recommend the approach I use when I'm corrected and has done some-
thing bad/stupid/wrong; thank the person correcting you or giving you
additional info. /Don't/ come up with a list of reasons, even if you
might think you have one, unless it's amusing or interesting.)
Regards,
'mr
--
[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is
beautiful. -- Neal Stephenson, _In the Beginning was the Command Line_
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> I figured out that the correct keywords would be "slime lisp", not
> just "slime", so I didn't get a correct response from google. Just my
Funny. The top hit I get from that is a CVS commit message from a
mailing list archive
Update of /project/slime/cvsroot/slime
In directory common-lisp.net:/tmp/cvs-serv10634
which is a pretty good clue to go and look on common-lisp.net.
There's also a couple of CLiki pages in the first page of google
results, one of which would have given you a direct link to the
project homepage.
Perhaps you tried google at a time it was updating.
-dan
--
"please make sure that the person is your friend before you confirm"
Ok, forget all of this, I don't want to polemize.
Daniel Barlow wrote:
> which is a pretty good clue to go and look on common-lisp.net.
> There's also a couple of CLiki pages in the first page of google
> results, one of which would have given you a direct link to the
> project homepage.
>
> Perhaps you tried google at a time it was updating.
Daniel Barlow <···@telent.net> writes:
> Perhaps you tried google at a time it was updating.
Huh, I think he did. The hits for "slime emacs" and "slime lisp" are
much better now. Recently I went through a client's website and made
changes so google could index everything (... checking ...) and it's
indexed now, where it wasn't last week. Cool.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> Recently I went through a client's website and made changes so google could
> index everything
What kind of web site changes does Google seem to require?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ ···@geddis.org
Don Geddis <···@geddis.org> writes:
> ···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> > Recently I went through a client's website and made changes so google could
> > index everything
>
> What kind of web site changes does Google seem to require?
It distinguishes pages based on the URL. So if you decide what page
to display based on information from cookies or POST queries, Google
might not be able to find all of your pages.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
On 2004-02-07 22:24:19, Thomas F. Burdick wrote:
> I'd recommend you also try out SLIME.
And very important: Use the tag FAIRLY-STABLE!
See http://www.cliki.net/SLIME%20Tips
How did I know this was going to happen?
How I hate religious people.
In article <···············@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>,
Thomas F. Burdick <···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>··@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) writes:
>
>> In article <·····················@mapcar.org>,
>> Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>> >On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 03:19:44PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
>> >> Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
>> >> M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
>> >
>> >The hands of a *real programmer* never leave the keyboard. :-P
>> >
>> >And with the nice command-completion that emacs has, it is very easy to
>> >type and figure out the name of the commands. If that fails, there is
>> >always apropos.
>>
>> So, like none of you unutterable bozos have actually *used* Jabberwocky, have
>> you?
>
>Wow, with such a measured, unemotional, nonabusive, informative
>recommendation as this, I'm jumping at the thought of trying those
>great advantages you mentioned. Oh wait, you didn't mention any, did
>you particle-monkey?
I don't care if you use punched cards or drink the hemlock kool-aide (and it's
'Chaos-monkey,' ya little ass-hat).
You're still an idiot for spouting on against a piece of software you've never
used simply because you've devoted your life to an editor that should have been
put out the pasture in the 1980s.
I already mentioned one advantage:
0) it works out of the box (assuming you can install Java, or it already is on
your system, which was pretty easy for me anyway).
Other advantages;
1) It does not crash -I don't know what version the other fellow is using (I am
using the stable version 1.0.04), but mine don't crash. emacs regularly does.
2) The browser setup works properly (and is faster than using the w3 thing built
into emacs, which I had to use, as the latest netscape is broken)
3) It remembers what you were doing last.
4) Auto-completion works properly, and it puts the other friggin' parenthesis
in where it should be (since you have to close parenthesis, the editor might as
well put a ')' in when you type a '('
5) Proper use of the screen (i.e. it doesn't assume you're running on a 80
character wide monochrome terminal)
6) You don't have to know lisp to use it (one of the dumb things about emacs +
ilisp is that you have to know lisp to *set it up* -think about that for a
second)
7) You can record 'macros' (yes, this is a dumb name for anything in a Lisp IDE)
of commonly performed actions, which means anything emacs can do can be
implemented in Jabberwocky, and more, without delving into time-wasting baloney.
8) The profiler is the tits
9) The debugger is also the tits
10) Vaguely MSVC++ -like project manager thingee
11) You don't need to read the manual to use the thing. That doesn't mean it is
less powerful (I never needed to read the Python manual either). That means it
is better designed.
12) Lisp is the extention language, just like in emacs -except that it ain't
emacs-lisp, and the documentation for this aspect of the editor doesn't suck
(unlike emacs which has documentation nearly as useless as that which comes with
most Lisp tools)
13) Did I mention the documentation is excellent?
14) Ineffable coolness factor: it just works. It immediately becomes an aid, and
never gets in the way: like any good tool should.
15) Oh yeah, and there are enough emacs-isms in the thing to make even a
long-time emacs user happy.
Now, I don't want to hear from you on this subject until you have gone an used
it for a couple of weeks. When you realize what a bloviating jackass you've been
for opening the proverbial orofice on the protuberance which adorns the end of
your neck on something you know nothing about, I'll accept your apology.
> /|_ .-----------------------.
> ,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
> ,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
> / / `-----------------------'
Wow; a Berkeley pinko -how original.
I always found it amusing when elitist jackanapes who live in one of the most
expensive parts of the nation, nay, the world, blather on about "class war."
When Oakland and Vallejo decide to bring class war against Berkeley, Brother
Lupo will certainly be on the "Sonny Barger" side with the peasants, where he
belongs.
-Lupo
"They are instructed in excellence in three things from age 5 to 20; to
ride, to draw the bow and to speak the truth." -Herodotus <··@io.com>
On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 03:50:58PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
> How did I know this was going to happen?
Because you wrote an inflammatory article proclaiming a not-so-widely
held opinion?
> How I hate religious people.
What does religion have to do with this?
> In article <···············@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>,
> Thomas F. Burdick <···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
> >··@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) writes:
> >
> >> In article <·····················@mapcar.org>,
> >> Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> >> >On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 03:19:44PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
> >> >> Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
> >> >> M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
> >> >
> >> >The hands of a *real programmer* never leave the keyboard. :-P
> >> >
> >> >And with the nice command-completion that emacs has, it is very easy to
> >> >type and figure out the name of the commands. If that fails, there is
> >> >always apropos.
Seeing that this was misunderstood, I will attempt to elucidate below.
> >> So, like none of you unutterable bozos have actually *used* Jabberwocky, have
> >> you?
> >Wow, with such a measured, unemotional, nonabusive, informative
> >recommendation as this, I'm jumping at the thought of trying those
> >great advantages you mentioned. Oh wait, you didn't mention any, did
> >you particle-monkey?
> You're still an idiot for spouting on against a piece of software you've never
> used simply because you've devoted your life to an editor that should have been
> put out the pasture in the 1980s.
I think you missed an great deal of not-so-subtle sarcasm here. My
original post was made in jest, but with a kernel of truth. How about I
expand on that?
> I already mentioned one advantage:
>
> 0) it works out of the box (assuming you can install Java, or it already is on
> your system, which was pretty easy for me anyway).
After a brief persual of the documentation I was able to install it.
The docs fail to mention, though, that you need to have a lisp installed
to do so. Not a big deal.
> Other advantages;
> 1) It does not crash -I don't know what version the other fellow is using (I am
> using the stable version 1.0.04), but mine don't crash. emacs regularly does.
What version of Emacs are you using? Emacs never crashes on me.
> 2) The browser setup works properly (and is faster than using the w3 thing built
> into emacs, which I had to use, as the latest netscape is broken)
I don't see how the latest netscape being broken has anything to do with
Emacs. But I concur that browser setup in Jabberwocky is simple.
> 3) It remembers what you were doing last.
Nice feature. http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SessionManagement
> 4) Auto-completion works properly, and it puts the other friggin' parenthesis
> in where it should be (since you have to close parenthesis, the editor might as
> well put a ')' in when you type a '('
Not only does Emacs do this perfectly well, but it does it far better
than Jabberwocky as far as I can tell.
Jabberwocky automatically maps ( to balanced parentheses insert.
Wonderful. Unfortunately, it does not map ) to balanced parentheses
close. Terrible. Exactly how am I supposed to edit with balanced
parentheses when the editor doesn't support closing them? Use the
cursor keys? Speaking of which, I have to use the cursor keys to move
around!?! (more on this later).
Emacs, by default, maps M-( and M-) to balanced parentheses insert and
close. Just in case you don't know what it means to close parentheses
properly, it means: find next close parenthesis and stick it in the
proper place if it wasn't already there, then move cursor to next line,
properly indented. Try it out, it's really nice. And it doesn't take
much Emacs knowledge to remap this to ( and ).
> 5) Proper use of the screen (i.e. it doesn't assume you're running on a 80
> character wide monochrome terminal)
Neither does Emacs. You must be running a really old version of Emacs.
Not only do I edit with balanced parentheses, automatic indentation, and
syntax coloring, but I can also insert (say) Japanese text and save it
in a variety of encodings.
> 6) You don't have to know lisp to use it (one of the dumb things about emacs +
> ilisp is that you have to know lisp to *set it up* -think about that for a
> second)
apt-get install cmucl-normal emacs21 ilisp
No lisp knowledge needed. (And if you don't use Debian then (a) XEmacs
comes with ILISP (b) if you can read a README then you can install any
Emacs package, it usually just requires cutting and pasting a few lines
from the guide into your ~/.emacs. Not a big deal, IMHO).
> 7) You can record 'macros' (yes, this is a dumb name for anything in a Lisp IDE)
> of commonly performed actions, which means anything emacs can do can be
> implemented in Jabberwocky, and more, without delving into time-wasting baloney.
Those sorts of macros are a work-around for the problem of not having a
fully customizable/programmable editor.
> 8) The profiler is the tits
> 9) The debugger is also the tits
It, uh, looks like it could be nice...if it made any sense...
(Why is the value of '*' in a sub-expression of an arithmetic expression
considered to be 9 when that should've been the value of the entire
expression?)
Actually, I found the IDE to be rather awkward and annoying in many
ways. It's still very rough. I remember when I first was playing with
it, I deleted some text, but it kept being pasted back whenever I typed
( for some mysterious reason. And selection, and cursor movement, is
a little odd.
The documentation isn't too great on the debugger... I was reading the
User's Guide.
> 10) Vaguely MSVC++ -like project manager thingee
Can't stand those things. And the Jabberwocky method doesn't look too
wonderful either, being based on directory structure and such. I think
ASDF is simple and powerful enough.
> 11) You don't need to read the manual to use the thing. That doesn't mean it is
> less powerful (I never needed to read the Python manual either). That means it
> is better designed.
Really? I sure did. That is, to actually be able to *use* the thing!
Who would've guessed that Ctrl-Enter means 'send expression to lisp'
(except that it seems to mean 'send some not-well-defined expression to
lisp', but anyway).
> 12) Lisp is the extention language, just like in emacs -except that it ain't
> emacs-lisp, and the documentation for this aspect of the editor doesn't suck
> (unlike emacs which has documentation nearly as useless as that which comes with
> most Lisp tools)
Sounds nice. The documentation seems like a reference table; not
horrible, but not wonderful either.
> 13) Did I mention the documentation is excellent?
I would have to disagree, for now.
> 14) Ineffable coolness factor: it just works. It immediately becomes an aid, and
> never gets in the way: like any good tool should.
> 15) Oh yeah, and there are enough emacs-isms in the thing to make even a
> long-time emacs user happy.
Wrong on both counts, and here's why:
It doesn't ``just work.'' Nothing does. Why, I sat in front of the
computer screen and willed the program to ``just work'' for 5 minutes!
No effect. So I took more pragmatic action: I read the docs.
Now, assuming that this was an editor designed for programmers, I went
and looked at the keybindings to see how they were laid out. To my
absolute horror (as a programmer) I saw that the movement commands were
all set to the arrow keys. So, getting back to my original joke about
``hands never leaving the keyboard,'' I will further refine this and say
that a programmer's hands should never have to leave the touch-typing
position; especially for something as common as cursor movement. And
seeing how Emacs has acquired and evolved a set of movement keys over
the course of many years, created and adopted by many programmers, it is
no surprise that they are quick to use. Even though Emacs is not a true
structure editor, it has numerous commands for exploring and
manipulating S-expressions. Jabberwocky has ALT-Left and ALT-Right.
And they don't even work as advertised. This is a huge loss; this is
editting capability on the level of Notepad.
I didn't start out knowing much about Emacs, and for many years I just
used it in a slight fashion, along with many other editors. Contrary to
popular opinion, Emacs allows this sort of half-assed usage with little
complaint (and then people start to wonder ``What's so special about
Emacs?''). Then one day, I decided that I was going to learn how to use
the editor well. It wasn't hard, I started off with the tutorial that
Emacs tells you about on start-up. Then I read some of the other
material under the ``Help'' menu and the C-h menu. Then I started using
the advanced keys in daily programming. Eventually, I stopped using the
cursor keys completely, and I switched over completely to balanced
parentheses editting. I like the S-expression movement commands so much
that I even use them with other languages (sometimes this is not
good...). And SLIME seems to have fixed much that was wrong with ILISP.
And I've even taken an interest in playing with the ~/.emacs file.
I'll freely admit that Emacs is 80's technology. But I'll also add that
it still kicks the shit out of the majority of IDEs out there. Part of
the reason is that those IDEs just have crappy designs. The other part
of the reason is that Emacs is incredibly customizable, and incredibly
mature by comparison. So, I suppose, there is hope for Jabberwocky, but
it's going to take a lot of work first.
> Now, I don't want to hear from you on this subject until you have gone
> an used it for a couple of weeks. When you realize what a bloviating
> jackass you've been for opening the proverbial orofice on the
> protuberance which adorns the end of your neck on something you know
> nothing about, I'll accept your apology.
`bloviate', that's a good one.
Quite frankly, I can't use it for an hour without getting terribly
frustrated. If you can point out that my grievances are illusory, to
the point where I can use it in an advanced fashion, then I will try it
for longer periods.
P.S. Speaking of words, why does the author of Jabberwocky feel the need
to invent the word `indentate'?
--
; Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu>
; OpenPGP public key: C24B6010 on keyring.debian.org
; Signed or encrypted mail welcome.
; "There is no dark side of the moon really; matter of fact, it's all dark."
In article <·····················@mapcar.org>,
Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 03:50:58PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
>> How did I know this was going to happen?
>
>Because you wrote an inflammatory article proclaiming a not-so-widely
>held opinion?
Suggesting someone use a tool other than emacs isn't considered an
inflammatory article among ordinary human beings. Or even ordinary
computer programmers.
>> How I hate religious people.
>
>What does religion have to do with this?
See my previous comment.
When people invest a considerable amount of time and effort into something
shitty, whether emacs, christianity or an obnoxious significant other,
they go through all manner of rationalization to avoid change, even when
they have long since past the point of making themselves ridiculous.
>> >> So, like none of you unutterable bozos have actually *used*
>Jabberwocky, have
>> >> you?
>> >Wow, with such a measured, unemotional, nonabusive, informative
>> >recommendation as this, I'm jumping at the thought of trying those
>> >great advantages you mentioned. Oh wait, you didn't mention any, did
>> >you particle-monkey?
>> You're still an idiot for spouting on against a piece of software
>you've never
>> used simply because you've devoted your life to an editor that should
>have been
>> put out the pasture in the 1980s.
>
>I think you missed an great deal of not-so-subtle sarcasm here. My
>original post was made in jest, but with a kernel of truth.
*shrugs*
I don't care either way. It's evident you've at least spent a few minutes
looking at Jabberwocky at this point, which is good.
It is also evident other people have spent the time possibly freeing
themselves from emacs gibberish, which is even better.
>> 0) it works out of the box (assuming you can install Java, or it
>already is on
>> your system, which was pretty easy for me anyway).
>
>After a brief persual of the documentation I was able to install it.
>The docs fail to mention, though, that you need to have a lisp installed
>to do so. Not a big deal.
In fact they do not fail to mention this. And, it would be a little
pointless to have a lisp IDE without lisp, now wouldn't it?
I've got a fresh copy of Allegro's IDE on my desk; I'm pretty sure I was
supposed to install their Lisp first (more on this later).
>> 5) Proper use of the screen (i.e. it doesn't assume you're running on a 80
>> character wide monochrome terminal)
>
>Neither does Emacs. You must be running a really old version of Emacs.
>Not only do I edit with balanced parentheses, automatic indentation, and
>syntax coloring, but I can also insert (say) Japanese text and save it
>in a variety of encodings.
In an 80-character wide window, meant to fit on a freaking Z-19 terminal.
My screen is rather bigger than that. It even has the opposite aspect
ratio (assuming I'm not confusing my Z-19's with my tektronics term).
Jabberwocky fills up the screen with useful information. Emacs wastes the
screen and hides useful information.
>> 7) You can record 'macros' (yes, this is a dumb name for anything in a
>Lisp IDE)
>> of commonly performed actions, which means anything emacs can do can be
>> implemented in Jabberwocky, and more, without delving into
>time-wasting baloney.
>
>Those sorts of macros are a work-around for the problem of not having a
>fully customizable/programmable editor.
Um, yeah.
Those sorts of macros are for people who don't want to learn about the
internals of an editor to use macros.
As near as I can tell, Jabberwocky is just as customizable and
programmable as emacs. You can probably even post to usenet from it, if
you are clever, though I have no idea why you would want to, other than
to impress other propellor heads.
And, no, xemacs doesn't come with ilisp installed.
>> 14) Ineffable coolness factor: it just works. It immediately becomes
>an aid, and
>> never gets in the way: like any good tool should.
>> 15) Oh yeah, and there are enough emacs-isms in the thing to make even a
>> long-time emacs user happy.
>
>Wrong on both counts, and here's why:
>
>It doesn't ``just work.'' Nothing does. Why, I sat in front of the
>computer screen and willed the program to ``just work'' for 5 minutes!
>No effect. So I took more pragmatic action: I read the docs.
This is ridiculous enough a statement to pass over, considering the
dismal, near worthless documentation that comes with emacs.
You want an example of a good documentation system, assuming you can't
see that Jabberwocky has a good documentation system for religious
reasons, go look at that which comes with Lush.
http://lush.sourceforge.com
>Now, assuming that this was an editor designed for programmers, I went
>and looked at the keybindings to see how they were laid out. To my
>absolute horror (as a programmer) I saw that the movement commands were
>all set to the arrow keys. So, getting back to my original joke about
>``hands never leaving the keyboard,'' I will further refine this and say
>that a programmer's hands should never have to leave the touch-typing
>position; especially for something as common as cursor movement.
If you're the type of person who thinks ctrl-b and ctrl-f makes more sense
than arrow keys, you're perfectly able to remap the keybindings to make it
so. I can't help it if your hooks can't find the arrow keys; mine never
had a problem with it, even when using vastly different keyboards.
I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys, which
occasionally seems to happen. Presumably because it assumes a terminal
from the 1980s or before.
> And
>seeing how Emacs has acquired and evolved a set of movement keys over
>the course of many years, created and adopted by many programmers, it is
>no surprise that they are quick to use.
I hear telegraphers could click out messages pretty quickly as well.
(paen to the emacs faith snipped)
> And SLIME seems to have fixed much that was wrong with ILISP.
On that, I certainly agree with you.
If you come from planet emacs, SLIME is very good, especially considering
how bleeding edge it is.
>And I've even taken an interest in playing with the ~/.emacs file.
I have no interest in playing with my .emacs file. I find it offensive
that I be asked to play with my files to get a tool to work. In order to
get ILISP or SLIME to work, you have to do such things.
>I'll freely admit that Emacs is 80's technology. But I'll also add that
>it still kicks the shit out of the majority of IDEs out there. Part of
>the reason is that those IDEs just have crappy designs. The other part
>of the reason is that Emacs is incredibly customizable, and incredibly
>mature by comparison.
Um, I certainly agree xemacs still kicks the shit out of the majority of
IDEs out there (you may recall, I basically have never bothered using
anything else unless forced, until JW), but this is not because emacs is
particularly good, nor because of its customizability (which is generally
highly overrated). It is because most other things are very very very bad.
Personally, I think it is time to leave the 1980s on the VAX (PDP-10,
whatever it was) behind.
>So, I suppose, there is hope for Jabberwocky, but it's going to take a
>lot of work first.
One could say the same thing about Common Lisp itself, with rather more
justification.
>Quite frankly, I can't use it for an hour without getting terribly
>frustrated. If you can point out that my grievances are illusory, to
>the point where I can use it in an advanced fashion, then I will try it
>for longer periods.
Use it, don't use it; your loss or gain.
Just don't complain about it if you haven't tried it.
-Lupo
"Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi" <··@fnord.io.com>
>>>>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:35:01 -0600, Lupo LeBoucher ("Lupo") writes:
I'm responding mostly about Emacs as an editor.
As an IDE, I find Emacs somewhat lacking, although servicable.
Lupo> Personally, I think it is time to leave the 1980s
Lupo> on the VAX (PDP-10, whatever it was) behind.
Of course! It is an observable fact that everything
that is (at least perceived as) newer is always better.
(You're off by more than a decade, by the way. The original version
of Emacs, which GNU Emacs is very much like, was the early-1970s on
the PDP-10. Some versions of Emacs from the 1980s, along with some
other IDE features that were tightly integrated with Emacs, were better
than GNU Emacs, but unfortunately we don't have those anymore.)
Lupo> It is also evident other people have spent the time possibly
Lupo> freeing themselves from emacs gibberish, which is even better.
I'm not sure what you're referring to as "gibberish", but I suppose it
must either be the Emacs key bindings, or the elisp extension language.
I think that's just personal preference: one man's gibberish...
Lupo> I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys,
Lupo> which occasionally seems to happen.
That never happens to anyone but you.
Lupo> In an 80-character wide window, meant to fit on a freaking Z-19 terminal.
Emacs runs on whatever screen size you want, like any other program.
Originally, Emacs was not designed for 80 column terminals (in fact,
not for ASCII terminals at all). Emacs did run very nicely on the
H-19, though. (What am I saying? It even ran GNU Emacs last week
on an H-19, and it still worked fine there,..heh heh.) But all that
hardly seems relevent to anything, except as a historical footnote
about where the shift modifer Control/Meta idea comes from.
I like the Control/Meta keyboard-based command set, by the way.
I never use the arrow keys. But I pressed some just now, just
for you, to make sure they still work like they always have.
Lupo> And, no, xemacs doesn't come with ilisp installed.
You are incorrect: I just now downloaded and installed XEmacs,
and it comes with ILISP. (This is if you just take the defaults,
clicking on "Open" in your browser on the download page.)
You make so many statements that conflict with observable facts,
that your credibility about anything here is rather low.
Lupo> This is ridiculous enough a statement to pass over, considering
Lupo> the dismal, near worthless documentation that comes with emacs.
I think the Emacs documentation is pretty good. But I have observed
that, for some reason I haven't yet fathomed, it is difficult for
beginners who are used to other editors to get their heads around it.
In particular, they have a hard time figuring out what to look for.
They have no luck trying to use the APROPOS feature at all.
I suppose that has to do with the organization of the concepts in
Emacs, but maybe it just really means Emacs isn't the best thing for
everybody. I know some programmers who are actually unhappy with
anything that's more powerful than Notepad, so there are definitely
different sets of expectations about editors and IDEs out there.
Different people like to use different tools, and most have very
strong personal preferences. Key bindings are especially sensitive.
Personally, I'm sufficiently happy with Emacs that I am unlikely to
ever switch to any other editor, although I might prefer some other
IDE if it could be integrated to play with Emacs. GNU Emacs lacks
sufficient power to do many basic (graphical and window-oriented)
things that I want in my IDE.
I've been using Emacs continuously (all day every day) since 1979,
and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in Emacs.
I also don't consider the current incarnation (GNU Emacs) to be the
best Emacs that's been around - the Lisp Machine version was better
in many ways. To make certain kinds of improvements might not be
feasible within the framework of GNU Emacs (or XEmacs, same thing).
I might get around to taking a look at Jabberywocky, although the
"endorsements" from you are not very encouraging. I am hoping that
there might be something worth looking at there, even though your
advertisements have been full of misinformation about Emacs.
But even if Jabberwocky can integrate with my preferred editor,
I'd be very surprised if it provided the particular functionality
that I want. Currently, I get some of that desired functionality
from Lispworks (and could implement the rest of it myself if I
were really missing it that badly, I guess.)
I'm going to stop reading this thread now, by the way.
Mostly just wanted to rebut some of your factual errors,
for the record.
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote in message news:<·············@news.dtpq.com>...
> >>>>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:35:01 -0600, Lupo LeBoucher ("Lupo") writes:
>
> Lupo> I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys,
> Lupo> which occasionally seems to happen.
>
> That never happens to anyone but you.
HAHAHAH
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=arrow+keys+emacs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en
Phygelus
In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
Phygelus <········@yahoo.com> wrote:
> ······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote in message
> news:<·············@news.dtpq.com>...
> > >>>>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:35:01 -0600, Lupo LeBoucher ("Lupo") writes:
> >
> > Lupo> I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys,
> > Lupo> which occasionally seems to happen.
> >
> > That never happens to anyone but you.
>
> HAHAHAH
> http://groups.google.com/groups?q=arrow+keys+emacs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en
Assumed humor aside, let's take a look at these...
1993, 1989, 1989, 1991, 1995, 1993, 1993, 1992, 1992, 1992,
1994, 1992, 1995, 1994, 1992, 1993, 1993, 1994, 1993, 1989,
1990, 1990, 1992, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1991, 1996, 1991, *2002*
All right, on hit 30 we got something reasonably modern! And, as
expected, it's a user coming from a broken Windows terminal emulator.
I believe most modern Emacs users will be using a GUI version of it,
which will NOT have terminal problems. Certainly if you want to compare
Emacs to Jabberwocky you'd better be comparing the GUI version.
-bcd
--
*** Brian Downing <bdowning at lavos dot net>
In article <·······················@attbi_s03>,
Brian Downing <·············@lavos.net> wrote:
>In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
>Phygelus <········@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> ······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote in message
>> news:<·············@news.dtpq.com>...
>> > >>>>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:35:01 -0600, Lupo LeBoucher ("Lupo") writes:
>> >
>> > Lupo> I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys,
>> > Lupo> which occasionally seems to happen.
>> >
>> > That never happens to anyone but you.
>>
>> HAHAHAH
>> http://groups.google.com/groups?q=arrow+keys+emacs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en
>
>Assumed humor aside, let's take a look at these...
>
>1993, 1989, 1989, 1991, 1995, 1993, 1993, 1992, 1992, 1992,
>1994, 1992, 1995, 1994, 1992, 1993, 1993, 1994, 1993, 1989,
>1990, 1990, 1992, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1991, 1996, 1991, *2002*
>
>All right, on hit 30 we got something reasonably modern! And, as
>expected, it's a user coming from a broken Windows terminal emulator.
Try sorting by date.
Ooo, there are a couple in Feb of 2004, aren't there?
And they ain't even Windows related.
Oh, pardon me; I forgot: emacs is perfect, freedom is slavery, and Richard
Stallman is Jesus.
http://www.stallman.org/saintignucius.jpg
-Lupo
"I hope god is real, so I can punch him in the throat when I die." -Fishninja
In article <······················@io.com>, Lupo LeBoucher <··@io.com> wrote:
> Try sorting by date.
> Ooo, there are a couple in Feb of 2004, aren't there?
> And they ain't even Windows related.
Yes, there are some hits for "arrow keys emacs" in February of 2004.
Unfortunately none of them are about arrow keys not working in Emacs.
Did you even read them?
> Oh, pardon me; I forgot: emacs is perfect, freedom is slavery, and Richard
> Stallman is Jesus.
Emacs is not perfect. I don't personally like it that much, except for
Lisp-like languages; I prefer vim otherwise. But saying that many users
have trouble TODAY with arrow keys in Emacs (especially considering most
new users will be using the GUI version!) and that it crashes all the
time is inexcusably inaccurate.
Some people like Emacs. Some like vim. Some people even like
NOTEPAD.EXE. You and several others like Jabberwocky. That's great. I
couldn't stand using Jabberwocky to write Lisp code because of its
complete and total lack of usable structure-editing commands.
Apparently that doesn't bother you, which is fine, but don't belittle
people for using a powerful tool that works well for them.
-bcd
--
*** Brian Downing <bdowning at lavos dot net>
In article <·············@news.dtpq.com>,
Christopher C. Stacy <······@news.dtpq.com> wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:35:01 -0600, Lupo LeBoucher ("Lupo") writes:
>
>I'm responding mostly about Emacs as an editor.
>As an IDE, I find Emacs somewhat lacking, although servicable.
Well, I agree completely.
As I have said, numerous times: I have used emacs for a decade for editing and
software development. As a swiss army knife text editor, it is the best thing
available. As a Lisp IDE, it is not so spiffy. JW is infinitely better. So is
the Allegro IDE thus far.
Now, if only I had something other than emacs for Lush development, though,
fortunately I at least have emacs for that.
> Lupo> Personally, I think it is time to leave the 1980s
> Lupo> on the VAX (PDP-10, whatever it was) behind.
>
>Of course! It is an observable fact that everything
>that is (at least perceived as) newer is always better.
If you truely believe emacs is the end of text editing history... well,
that says something about low expectations for computer science. This is not a
solved problem.
>(You're off by more than a decade, by the way. The original version
>of Emacs, which GNU Emacs is very much like, was the early-1970s on
>the PDP-10. Some versions of Emacs from the 1980s, along with some
>other IDE features that were tightly integrated with Emacs, were better
>than GNU Emacs, but unfortunately we don't have those anymore.)
Presumably you're referring to legendary things I've heard of like Zwei and the
Symbolics Lisp machine IDE?
Everyone who has used the latter sings its praises. I am suprised nobody has
reinvented it if it was all that.
> Lupo> I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys,
> Lupo> which occasionally seems to happen.
>
>That never happens to anyone but you.
Um, that's pretty funny.
Someone else posted the ten zillion google hits to the contrary.
I suppose emacs never ever crashes either, and always works right out of the
box, sort of like how xemacs comes with ilisp installed, right?
>I like the Control/Meta keyboard-based command set, by the way.
>I never use the arrow keys. But I pressed some just now, just
>for you, to make sure they still work like they always have.
I like *some* of it (and it has become quite natural after a decade of
practise -think about that for a minute), but I do not find it optimal. I've
already pointed it, this is available within the JW IDE; if you want, or if it
fills you with less anxiety to use it, you can call JW a "version of emacs."
The author of JW even takes the trouble to praise xemacs as the best editor of
all time, presumably so as not to offend prickly emacs fanatics, such as those
which apparently populate this forum (and also because it happens to be true).
> Lupo> And, no, xemacs doesn't come with ilisp installed.
>
>You are incorrect: I just now downloaded and installed XEmacs,
>and it comes with ILISP. (This is if you just take the defaults,
>clicking on "Open" in your browser on the download page.)
>
>You make so many statements that conflict with observable facts,
>that your credibility about anything here is rather low.
*snork*
Yeah, and the arrow keys always work in emacs, too.
And common lisp has an easy to use FFI, simple ability to talk to the OS, good
string handling, top-notch libraries, a "make" facility which is far better
than make, and excellent documentation.
I really wish I lived on the same planet as you people. On that planet I would
be deliriously happy with the atrocities you're telling me are so damned great
instead of mildly annoyed with them, yet intrigued by their potential.
> Lupo> This is ridiculous enough a statement to pass over, considering
> Lupo> the dismal, near worthless documentation that comes with emacs.
>
>I think the Emacs documentation is pretty good. But I have observed
>that, for some reason I haven't yet fathomed, it is difficult for
>beginners who are used to other editors to get their heads around it.
>In particular, they have a hard time figuring out what to look for.
>They have no luck trying to use the APROPOS feature at all.
Think about that for a minute. If you've used something for long enough you are
no longer a "beginner," pretty much anything is easy and intuitive to use. I
realize circular reasoning is inherent to recursive structures in Lisp, but
surely you can see when you're in an endless loop?
There are lots of intuitive help systems out there. VMS came with a better one
than emacs does, and even a beginner could use it (why would anyone BUT a
beginner need to use the freakin' help system, hmmm?). The one which comes with
emacs, and its bastard stepchild, 'info' are abominations which are best used as
examples of what NOT to do.
>Different people like to use different tools, and most have very
>strong personal preferences. Key bindings are especially sensitive.
>Personally, I'm sufficiently happy with Emacs that I am unlikely to
>ever switch to any other editor, although I might prefer some other
>IDE if it could be integrated to play with Emacs.
Personally, I like to use jed for my lightweight shit; mostly because it has
emacs key-bindings, which I have unfortunatley grown used to. It's a lot faster
than emacs.
> GNU Emacs lacks
>sufficient power to do many basic (graphical and window-oriented)
>things that I want in my IDE.
That's more or less why I prefer Jabberwocky to xemacs.
>I might get around to taking a look at Jabberywocky, although the
>"endorsements" from you are not very encouraging. I am hoping that
>there might be something worth looking at there, even though your
>advertisements have been full of misinformation about Emacs.
As I have said: I don't give a rat's ass if you use it, or go back to
transmitting messages via heliograph.
Anyone who bags on a program they've never used, simply because its existence
is threatening to their small world-views is a blithering idiot.
-Lupo
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they
are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief."
--Francis Bacon <··@dillenger.io.com>
>>>>> On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 21:34:15 -0600, Lupo LeBoucher ("Lupo") writes:
Lupo> I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys,
Lupo> which occasionally seems to happen.
>>
>> That never happens to anyone but you.
Lupo> Um, that's pretty funny.
Lupo> Someone else posted the ten zillion google hits to the contrary.
Actually, when someone went and looked up those links,
it turned out that they didn't say what you are claiming.
Are you a sock puppet of that other guy, by the way?
Lupo> I suppose emacs never ever crashes either, and always works
Lupo> right out of the box, sort of like how xemacs comes with ilisp
Lupo> installed, right?
I don't know about "never crashes", but it's never crashed on me.
Lupo> I like *some* of it (and it has become quite natural after a
Lupo> decade of practise -think about that for a minute)
I've been thinking about for more than 20 years, but it
seemed natural to me from the moment it was shown to me.
So what?
Lupo> *snork*
Lupo> Yeah, and the arrow keys always work in emacs, too.
So, when presented with facts and reality, all you can
do is say "snork" and keep repeating your unfounded claims.
Impressive.
All done now, Mr. Troll.
Hope you enjoyed the ride.
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote in message news:<·············@news.dtpq.com>...
> All done now, Mr. Troll.
> Hope you enjoyed the ride.
His strategy is sensible; get Jabberwocky into public consciousness by
attacking the current leader. Too bad he didn't hype it after a good
upcoming 2.0 release; a config file was corrupted during my
installation, and the install console frequently complained with
warnings. Bad first impression.
I hope Lupo doesn't get on my ass about DLing only 2.0; who wants to
check out 1.0 unless otherwise instructed?
Emacs is indeed a terrible editor in terms of learning curve. However
that's an engineering tradeoff because they simply don't have the
resources to polish it. I prefer that tradeoff to a weaker but
easier-to-use environment.
Maybe I can write a conceptual intro to emacs. I'm no power-user by
any means and there are parts I have no clue about. I still don't
enjoy moving point around because the api sometimes wants me to.
However, the only really good intro I've read to Emacs is in Peter
Salus's _Handbook of Programming Languages_, and I don't think it's
freely available.
··@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) writes:
> In article <·············@news.dtpq.com>,
> Christopher C. Stacy <······@news.dtpq.com> wrote:
> >>>>>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:35:01 -0600, Lupo LeBoucher ("Lupo") writes:
>
> > Lupo> This is ridiculous enough a statement to pass over, considering
> > Lupo> the dismal, near worthless documentation that comes with emacs.
> >
> >I think the Emacs documentation is pretty good. But I have observed
> >that, for some reason I haven't yet fathomed, it is difficult for
> >beginners who are used to other editors to get their heads around it.
> >In particular, they have a hard time figuring out what to look for.
> >They have no luck trying to use the APROPOS feature at all.
>
> Think about that for a minute. If you've used something for long enough you are
> no longer a "beginner," pretty much anything is easy and intuitive to use. I
> realize circular reasoning is inherent to recursive structures in Lisp, but
> surely you can see when you're in an endless loop?
>
I know people who have been using computers for years and still don't
know any more about how to manage them than they did when they
started. I also know an EE and physicist whos built and debugged all
manner of hardware who was unable to debug a network failure which
consisted of the coax connector accidentally detaching from the jack
on the NIC. In other words, time is necessary for learning something
complex, but spending time doesn't mean you're learning.
Gregm
On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 09:34:15PM -0600, Lupo LeBoucher wrote:
> Um, that's pretty funny.
> Someone else posted the ten zillion google hits to the contrary.
circa 1992, for all but one.
> I suppose emacs never ever crashes either, and always works right out of the
> box, sort of like how xemacs comes with ilisp installed, right?
> *snork*
> Yeah, and the arrow keys always work in emacs, too.
>
> And common lisp has an easy to use FFI, simple ability to talk to the OS, good
> string handling, top-notch libraries, a "make" facility which is far better
> than make, and excellent documentation.
I really am starting to become convinced that you are posting through a
time-warp from approximately 1997. Your claims seem to have no basis in
present reality.
> Think about that for a minute. If you've used something for long enough you are
> no longer a "beginner," pretty much anything is easy and intuitive to use. I
> realize circular reasoning is inherent to recursive structures in Lisp, but
> surely you can see when you're in an endless loop?
Circular reasoning is not how you think about recursively defined
structures in any language.
> Anyone who bags on a program they've never used
Who is `bagging' on a program they never used? I gave you hard evidence
and reasoning for why Jabberwocky is an inferior development environment
(IDE!) to Emacs. You give back lots of rhetoric and insults.
--
; Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu>
; OpenPGP public key: C24B6010 on keyring.debian.org
; Signed or encrypted mail welcome.
; "There is no dark side of the moon really; matter of fact, it's all dark."
There is a good point in this debate, and that is that Emacs is
newbie-hostile.
I think that emacs is *the* text editor, btw, and I write a lot
of text and a lot of code. There is no substitute; nothing comes
close.
But I remember having to think about emacs commands, having to
look stuff up on the reference card, being ecstatic when I finally
found meta-x help and help apropos, stumbling across the "tutorial"
by browsing files in a ten megabyte directory after struggling
along in a crippled way for weeks not knowing more than about five
of the key-combo commands, etc.... What can I say, I was a newbie
and the interface seemed clunky and bizarre. There was a way to
ask it to do anything, but I didn't start out knowing any of the
things I could ask for -- not even help or apropos. It was opaque.
The sysadmin had it configured on that system so it didn't come
up with any intro text or anything the way I've seen more modern
emacses do, and preferred it that way. BTW, now that I've crawled
up the learning curve, so do I.
The thing about emacs is that, while you can't learn it in just an
afternoon (I couldn't anyway, and I've got documentation stating
that I'm a genius), you grow into it. Once you get used to its
interface you can do anything there is to do with text, fast,
efficiently, and without fuss or problems. There is no text editor
that is not emacs that is even close to being as flexible, useful,
and general. On a desktop system with a keyboard it is the proper
tool for every text editing task.
Bear
Ray Dillinger <····@sonic.net> writes:
> There is a good point in this debate, and that is that Emacs is
> newbie-hostile.
>
> I think that emacs is *the* text editor, btw, and I write a lot
> of text and a lot of code. There is no substitute; nothing comes
> close.
>
> But I remember having to think about emacs commands, having to
> look stuff up on the reference card, being ecstatic when I finally
> found meta-x help and help apropos, stumbling across the "tutorial"
> by browsing files in a ten megabyte directory after struggling
> along in a crippled way for weeks not knowing more than about five
> of the key-combo commands, etc....
Yes. I indeed think that it was totally useless for the emacs
programmers to have emacs display this first thing:
Welcome to GNU Emacs, one component of a Linux-based GNU system.
Get help C-h (Hold down CTRL and press h)
Undo changes C-x u Exit Emacs C-x C-c
Get a tutorial C-h t Use Info to read docs C-h i
Ordering manuals C-h RET
It's well know that the better user inteface for the newbies is the grunt.
An error? Grunt
An invalid command? Grunt
An impossible request? Grunt
An unfound file? Grunt
About what ed(1) does.
Better would be to send 1000 Volts to the user thru the keyboard, but
while logitech does not update their keyboard, let's have the programs
just grunt or beep.
Newbies won't read any error message or information notice anyway,
they prefer to browse the file system...
--
__Pascal_Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he doesn't
want merely because you think it would be good for him.--Robert Heinlein
http://www.theadvocates.org/
* Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> Yes. I indeed think that it was totally useless for the emacs
> programmers to have emacs display this first thing:
> [...]
But remember this is 1992. Yes, in ten years Emacs will do this nice
stuff, but at the moment we're stuck with emacs 18, which
half-heartedly supports X and often gets things like cursor keys
wrong, or epoch which supports X much better but explodes
periodically, destroying all your work. There are rumours that some
guy at a Lisp company is about to release a bootlegged version of
emacs 19, which might be better, but it's not here yet.
--tim
>>>>> On Sun, 15 Feb 2004 02:58:24 GMT, Ray Dillinger ("Ray") writes:
Ray> There is a good point in this debate, and that is
Ray> that Emacs is newbie-hostile.
I am not sure I totally agree with that sweeping generalization,
but there's something to it, and I'd like to explore this area.
Since most people here think that Emacs is a good piece of
technology, it may be instructive to analyze whether or not
it fails to satisfy some people, and the reasons why.
I would encourage people to use recollections of their own personal
experiences learning to use Emacs, from the beginning up to any
current frustrations and perceived deficiencies with it.
If they have been introducing others to Emacs, relating those
experiences would also be desirable.
(But random unfounded speculation that is not backed up by direct
observation of someone using the editor would not be useful.
All kinds of theories could be thus invented and fleshed out,
and they could still be totally bogus!)
The first step would be to identify the kind of user.
How much experience does he have with computers?
How much of it is on the same platforms as where Emacs is being used?
What other "editing" programs does the user have experience with?
What preconceived expectations about the functionality and
user-interface did the user have?
Why did they run Emacs?
What do they use Emacs for?
The second step would be to talk about how the user went
about learning Emacs. How did Emacs get installed?
Did they then just sit down and try it?
Did someone help them?
Did they run the on-line tutorial?
Did they read the on-line manual?
Did they figure out how to use the self-documentation?
Did they read the printed manual? Any other books?
Were those forms of documentation useful?
Next, what were the problems they experienced?
If they're coming from another editor, what is hard
to understand in Emacs, what seems very different,
and what seems undesirable to them?
What are perceived as the best features of Emacs?
Finally, we can analyze all that information and try to draw some
conclusions. This would not be so much about Emacs per se, but about
characterizing Emacs as a kind of application, characterizing users,
and characterizing usage and learning experiences. From there, maybe
we could make some suggestions about the entire process, including
software design, distribution, and documentation.
This would be interesting and useful because, in particular,
maybe Emacs shares some common characteristics with Common Lisp.
I think that just skipping to the final analysis and conclusions
without doing all the other investigative work first will just
result in random flaming.
----
So let me start by asking Ray some questions....
Ray> But I remember having to think about emacs commands, having to
Ray> look stuff up on the reference card, being ecstatic when I finally
Ray> found meta-x help and help apropos, stumbling across the "tutorial"
Ray> by browsing files in a ten megabyte directory after struggling
Ray> along in a crippled way for weeks not knowing more than about five
Ray> of the key-combo commands, etc....
When Emacs starts up, there's a menu bar with a "Help" menu.
The first item is "Emacs Tutorial". Besides the basic commands,
the tutorial teaches you how to run the self-documentation.
The on-line manual is also accessible from the "Help" menu.
Older versions of GNU Emacs didn't have a menu bar, and some
Emacs installations might not have it turned on.
But when all versions of Emacs start up, the first thing they
display is a prominent "Help" message that tells you how to
press the HELP key, get the tutorial, read the online manual,
order the printed manual, and turn on the menu bar.
So my first question would be: why do people have trouble
finding any or all that help?
Ray> The sysadmin had it configured on that system so it didn't come
Ray> up with any intro text or anything the way I've seen more modern
Ray> emacses do, and preferred it that way. BTW, now that I've crawled
Ray> up the learning curve, so do I.
I can't quite tell from your wording whether you think that "modern"
Emacs comes configured with the initial Help startup screen or not.
Current versions of Emacs comes with the help screens (and menus)
enabled by default. The installation instructions for Emacs
specifically admonish system administrators not to mess that
up (or change around keys, etc.) lest it confuse new users
The original (TECO) version of EMACS of course didn't have menus,
but it also began with a startup message saying how to get help.
(To wit, pressing the HELP key, which was c-_H). One difference
from GNU Emacs is that the online tutorial was not on a key.
The "Help-Help" told you to run the seperate "TEACHEMACS" for that.
I just checked the above by running both GNU Emacs 21.2
and the last version of TECO EMACS circa September 1981.
I would be very surprised if there was ever a release of Emacs
that did not have the Help startup message configured by default.
So I think the lesson here is that new users can be fully sabotaged
by incompetent system administrators who decide that new users won't
be wanting any of those bothersome "Help" messages!
Ray> The thing about emacs is that, while you can't learn it in just
Ray> an afternoon (I couldn't anyway, and I've got documentation
Ray> stating that I'm a genius), you grow into it.
I actually learned it in an afternoon, on a 300 baud printing terminal.
No documentation or anything, but I had someone showing me how to use it.
I wrote myself a cheat-sheet of the dozen or so basic keystroke commands.
I remember a couple of days later sitting down by myself at a (rare) CRT
terminal and seeing it for the first time with the real-time display feature.
I was, of course, astounded! I think my expectations at the time were
substantially different from today's computer users, to say the least.
One thing I'd like to understand is what they are expecting in
a program like Emacs (and thus perhaps in a more general sense).
The only thing I didn't like about Emacs was the c-W command, because
I didn't understand about the Mark and there was of course no visual
feedback as to where the Region would be. For some reason I sometimes
accidently typed c-W, and a piece of my buffer would vanish! I would
have no idea what I did, and I didn't know about Undo. (This is all
because I didn't read the manual for a long time, since I was getting
along just fine with the few basic commands that I initially learned.)
Eventually I learned about c-H L, saw that c-W was the culprit, and
learned to be afraid of typing c-W. So when I became a sophisticated
Emacs user, I undid the ^W key and moved "Kill Region" to a c-X
subcommand where I would never again type it accidently. (When the
Lisp Machine came along, there was visual indication of the Region,
so c-W was safe, but by then I had trained my fingers to use the
other keystrokes for that command anyway.)
········@fs^RInit$u.^RW
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> So my first question would be: why do people have trouble
> finding any or all that help?
Because people DON'T read the computer output. This could have been
in doubt in the time of CLI but no more with GUI: the number of alter
dialogs that get closed without being read! Hence the refining of the
Grunt! user interface. Don't bother with error messages, just grunt,
and if the device allow it, the second time send 1000 Volts to the
user. ed(1) was right!
> So I think the lesson here is that new users can be fully sabotaged
> by incompetent system administrators who decide that new users won't
> be wanting any of those bothersome "Help" messages!
Not nowadays, when the system administrators are actually the
distribution packages.
> I actually learned it in an afternoon, on a 300 baud printing
> terminal. No documentation or anything, but I had someone showing
> me how to use it. I wrote myself a cheat-sheet of the dozen or so
> basic keystroke commands. I remember a couple of days later sitting
> down by myself at a (rare) CRT terminal and seeing it for the first
> time with the real-time display feature. I was, of course,
> astounded! I think my expectations at the time were substantially
> different from today's computer users, to say the least. One thing
> I'd like to understand is what they are expecting in a program like
> Emacs (and thus perhaps in a more general sense).
That's another problem. I witnessed it with the evolution of MacOS.
The "intuitiveness" of the GUI built a lot on the progressiveness of
the feature introduction over the releases. People who learnt
Macintosh on the first version, then went up the ladder step by step
thru each versions had much less problems than people who skipped
directly to MacOS 6.0.5, or 7.1 or 8.5 or 9.0.
I learnt emacs by way of MPW (the ability to add commands to the
editor) and NeXTSTEP Edit.app (the basic command-keys). Actually, the
basics are explained in the tutorial. \
Emacs should force feed it to the novice users and should not allow
them to proceed before they've understood it.
--
__Pascal_Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he doesn't
want merely because you think it would be good for him.--Robert Heinlein
http://www.theadvocates.org/
Pascal Bourguignon <····@thalassa.informatimago.com> writes:
> ······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> > So my first question would be: why do people have trouble
> > finding any or all that help?
>
> Because people DON'T read the computer output. This could have been
> in doubt in the time of CLI but no more with GUI: the number of alter
> dialogs that get closed without being read! Hence the refining of the
> Grunt! user interface. Don't bother with error messages, just grunt,
> and if the device allow it, the second time send 1000 Volts to the
> user. ed(1) was right!
>
>
But some people just refuse to learn about their tools. My boss is a
Windows user- not because he particularly likes it, but he's used to
it. We host our development environments on Linux because Windows is
nearly useless for the sort of thing we're up to, and it has been a
continuous uphill battle to get him conversant with ssh onto the
development host- we use Putty. The bigger problem is getting him
into emacs on the host machine so he can write code. He's used to
some god-awful Windows editor, and has a lot of trouble with making
emacs work. I think vi would drive him insane. He also has no .emacs
file and is unwilling to spend the time to set one up (or even learn
about the features in the one I gave him), so he's stuck in a near
maximally inconvienent development environment and isn't willing to do
any work to mitigate it. Its like a construction worker who is
unwilling to learn how the backhoe works, choosing to stick with his
shovel & pickaxe because he's familiar with them.
There are no help features in emacs he cares about in the least. I
guess he views work on learning tools as time not spent getting his
job done, even though time spent on the former might save him a lot on
the latter.
Gregm
Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
>
> But some people just refuse to learn about their tools. My boss is a
> Windows user- not because he particularly likes it, but he's used to
> it. We host our development environments on Linux because Windows is
> nearly useless for the sort of thing we're up to, and it has been a
> continuous uphill battle to get him conversant with ssh onto the
> development host- we use Putty. The bigger problem is getting him
> into emacs on the host machine so he can write code. He's used to
> some god-awful Windows editor, and has a lot of trouble with making
> emacs work. I think vi would drive him insane. He also has no .emacs
> file and is unwilling to spend the time to set one up (or even learn
> about the features in the one I gave him), so he's stuck in a near
> maximally inconvienent development environment and isn't willing to do
> any work to mitigate it. Its like a construction worker who is
> unwilling to learn how the backhoe works, choosing to stick with his
> shovel & pickaxe because he's familiar with them.
You could try this psychological trick: get a emacs on MS-Windows
port, and have him use it on MS-Windows. Once he's confident with
emacs as a MS-Windows application, let him use it thru ssh.
--
__Pascal_Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he doesn't
want merely because you think it would be good for him.--Robert Heinlein
http://www.theadvocates.org/
Pascal Bourguignon <····@thalassa.informatimago.com> writes:
> Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
> >
> > But some people just refuse to learn about their tools. My boss is a
> > Windows user- not because he particularly likes it, but he's used to
> > it. We host our development environments on Linux because Windows is
> > nearly useless for the sort of thing we're up to, and it has been a
> > continuous uphill battle to get him conversant with ssh onto the
> > development host- we use Putty. The bigger problem is getting him
> > into emacs on the host machine so he can write code. He's used to
> > some god-awful Windows editor, and has a lot of trouble with making
> > emacs work. I think vi would drive him insane. He also has no .emacs
> > file and is unwilling to spend the time to set one up (or even learn
> > about the features in the one I gave him), so he's stuck in a near
> > maximally inconvienent development environment and isn't willing to do
> > any work to mitigate it. Its like a construction worker who is
> > unwilling to learn how the backhoe works, choosing to stick with his
> > shovel & pickaxe because he's familiar with them.
>
> You could try this psychological trick: get a emacs on MS-Windows
> port, and have him use it on MS-Windows. Once he's confident with
> emacs as a MS-Windows application, let him use it thru ssh.
He's seen NT Emacs, I've shown it to him- he only uses emacs on the
dev host because his horrid Windows editor won't run there. Its
really frustrating for me to see how frustrated he gets- just a few
days of work to tune up on the new environment would make his job so
much easier!
Gregm
>>>>> "GM" == Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
GM> ... Its really frustrating for me to see how frustrated he
GM> gets- just a few days of work to tune up on the new
GM> environment would make his job so much easier!
What does he miss? I had a client like that once. He was used to
ultra-edit on windows but all he needed to find emacs reasonable was
memorizing how to cut and paste regions (where the region is selected by
the mouse) and my turning on font-lock. This was for tcl though.
What does your guy need?
cheers,
BM
Bulent Murtezaoglu <··@acm.org> writes:
> >>>>> "GM" == Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
> GM> ... Its really frustrating for me to see how frustrated he
> GM> gets- just a few days of work to tune up on the new
> GM> environment would make his job so much easier!
>
> What does he miss? I had a client like that once. He was used to
> ultra-edit on windows but all he needed to find emacs reasonable was
> memorizing how to cut and paste regions (where the region is selected by
> the mouse) and my turning on font-lock. This was for tcl though.
> What does your guy need?
>
> cheers,
>
> BM
He wants to execute the scripts to do things he has encoded in his
head- without learning new ones. He's "wired" for click-n-drool, so
Emacs trips him up and he's not been willing to download the interface
for editor #2 into his head. He needs cut/paste, diff- the diff is
really the killer. He uses a particular Windows diff tool- I forget
its name- and finds ediff impossible to use.
Gregm
From: Erik Winkels
Subject: Re: Emacs newbies [Re: Which Emacs CL mode?}
Date:
Message-ID: <87fzdc40jw.fsf@xs4all.nl>
Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> wrote on 15 Feb 2004 11:10:59 -0500:
>
> He's seen NT Emacs, I've shown it to him- he only uses emacs on the
> dev host because his horrid Windows editor won't run there. Its
> really frustrating for me to see how frustrated he gets- just a few
> days of work to tune up on the new environment would make his job so
> much easier!
Why are you not changing his Emacs keybindings to those he's used to
on his horrid Windows editor? (Which editor is that anyway?)
I've grown up on MSX, Atari ST, Amiga and PC and I know no better than
the default Windows movement keys for using an editor and this was the
first thing I added when I started using Emacs.[1]
I do know how to use C-f, C-b (and hjkl in Vi) but I rarely use them,
only when necessary. The only exceptions are C-a, C-e, C-d and
M-Backspace which are somewhat ingrained.
Erik.
[1] The whole she-bang like cursor keys for movement; shift-cursor
keys for selecting regions; C-x, C-c, C-v for cutting, copying and
pasting; C-z for undo; Home, End for beginning and end-of-line;
etc.
Erik Winkels <·······@xs4all.nl> writes:
> Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> wrote on 15 Feb 2004 11:10:59 -0500:
> >
> > He's seen NT Emacs, I've shown it to him- he only uses emacs on the
> > dev host because his horrid Windows editor won't run there. Its
> > really frustrating for me to see how frustrated he gets- just a few
> > days of work to tune up on the new environment would make his job so
> > much easier!
>
> Why are you not changing his Emacs keybindings to those he's used to
> on his horrid Windows editor? (Which editor is that anyway?)
TextEdit or some such, pretty much a plain editor- no built-in tools.
The keybindings are only part of the problem, he's expecting
Windows-style interactions, with mouse, etc... and just isn't willing
to learn something else. Perhaps typically, he doesn't use very many
keybindings, its plain typing or using the mouse to play with menus &
toolbars. He's also unwilling to spend the time setting himself up
with Cygwin so he can develop on his local Windows using his preferred
tools. At this point, I just do what I can to set up things so he's
at a local minimum of pain. There is some hope- he did learn the
keystrokes for saving and exiting.
>
> [1] The whole she-bang like cursor keys for movement; shift-cursor
> keys for selecting regions; C-x, C-c, C-v for cutting, copying and
> pasting; C-z for undo; Home, End for beginning and end-of-line;
> etc.
Interestingly, I find these same keybindings annoying. At first, I
found emacs a little baroque as far as selecting, copying, pasting,
but quickly got used to it.
Gregm
Erik Winkels wrote:
> I've grown up on MSX, Atari ST, Amiga and PC and I know no better than
> the default Windows movement keys for using an editor and this was the
> first thing I added when I started using Emacs.[1]
>
Well, the Amiga actually shipped with an emacsoid called microemacs...
Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
> He's seen NT Emacs, I've shown it to him- he only uses emacs on the
> dev host because his horrid Windows editor won't run there. Its
If he used NT emacs on his desktop he could access the files on the
dev box using tramp (or its predecessor ange-ftp). It's not just a
training-for-real-emacs ploy, it's a viable solution in its own right.
And nt emacs with windows and mice and font-lock and stuff is probably
going to be a lot more pleasant for a new user than text-mode emacs
over ssh.
-dan
--
"please make sure that the person is your friend before you confirm"
Daniel Barlow <···@telent.net> writes:
> Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
>
> > He's seen NT Emacs, I've shown it to him- he only uses emacs on the
> > dev host because his horrid Windows editor won't run there. Its
>
> If he used NT emacs on his desktop he could access the files on the
> dev box using tramp (or its predecessor ange-ftp). It's not just a
> training-for-real-emacs ploy, it's a viable solution in its own right.
>
> And nt emacs with windows and mice and font-lock and stuff is probably
> going to be a lot more pleasant for a new user than text-mode emacs
> over ssh.
>
Agreed- I use NT Emacs whenever I have to use Windows, its quite good.
His problem is it doesn't act in the way he expects with his other
editor. I suppose learning emacs will be a gradual process for him-
to be fair, this is his first exposure to *nix of any kind- which is
intimidating on all sort of fronts.
Gregm
Daniel Barlow wrote:
> Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
>
>
>>He's seen NT Emacs, I've shown it to him- he only uses emacs on the
>>dev host because his horrid Windows editor won't run there. Its
>
>
> If he used NT emacs on his desktop he could access the files on the
> dev box using tramp (or its predecessor ange-ftp). It's not just a
> training-for-real-emacs ploy, it's a viable solution in its own right.
>
> And nt emacs with windows and mice and font-lock and stuff is probably
> going to be a lot more pleasant for a new user than text-mode emacs
> over ssh.
He probably wants someone familiar with tramp to show him how to use it,
though. If it's configured properly and gets cooperation from the
environment on the server then it just magically and effortlessly works,
but if there is any idiosncracy that prevents it from just working (and
there sometimes is) then he will be lost in a maze of twisty
configuration options, all alike.
From: Joe Marshall
Subject: Re: Emacs newbies [Re: Which Emacs CL mode?}
Date:
Message-ID: <65e8x6xk.fsf@comcast.net>
Greg Menke <··········@toadmail.com> writes:
> But some people just refuse to learn about their tools. My boss is a
> Windows user- not because he particularly likes it, but he's used to
> it. We host our development environments on Linux because Windows is
> nearly useless for the sort of thing we're up to, and it has been a
> continuous uphill battle to get him conversant with ssh onto the
> development host- we use Putty. The bigger problem is getting him
> into emacs on the host machine so he can write code. He's used to
> some god-awful Windows editor, and has a lot of trouble with making
> emacs work. I think vi would drive him insane. He also has no .emacs
> file and is unwilling to spend the time to set one up (or even learn
> about the features in the one I gave him), so he's stuck in a near
> maximally inconvienent development environment and isn't willing to do
> any work to mitigate it. Its like a construction worker who is
> unwilling to learn how the backhoe works, choosing to stick with his
> shovel & pickaxe because he's familiar with them.
Fire him.
--
~jrm
GREG wrote:
> But some people just refuse to learn about their tools. My boss is a
> Windows user- [.................]
Maybe `sam' editor (from bell&plan9, but this is (i hope) gpl-ed now)
can fit his needs? I know* (but newer used it) that sam is mouse-driven,
and user friendly (in terms of late 80's).
* there is nice but short descripton:
[http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch13s02.html#id2963798].
regards, szymon.
······@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote in message news:<················@news.dtpq.com>...
> I would encourage people to use recollections of their own personal
> experiences learning to use Emacs, from the beginning up to any
> current frustrations and perceived deficiencies with it.
> If they have been introducing others to Emacs, relating those
> experiences would also be desirable.
- Foreign (non-native) keystroke combinations
Users have two choices: rebind keys to platform defaults or learn
separate set of new keys. Rebinding keys has obvious problems; it
still won't help for using remote emacs installations, and clashes
with other keybindings is possible. (I didn't try Windows CUA very
carefully, so feel free to correct me if it avoids these issues.)
Learning new keys effectively loses all the hard-won knowledge that a
platform user learns.
- Non-normal look-and-feel.
Leads to a forbidding nature; makes users feel nervous and stupid.
What will I break if I do something wrong?
This may depend on the platform. I peeked at emacs on MacOS X; at
least superficially it looked friendlier than regular NTEmacs. As for
Unix, I've used it on multiple Unixes and none of them had a coherent
look-and-feel story, so Emacs wasn't unexpectedly weird. Of course,
over telnet it's an absolute win.
And since it's a Gnu project, should NTEmacs be particularly good?
The pro side would say that it must in order to commoditize Windows;
the con side would say it should be good enough to hook Windows users
but yet have a prod to move to a Free platform with a better emacs.
- People don't understand the concrete advantages of using Emacs
before they use it.
I basically learned it as a religious thing. I didn't really know the
advantages coming into it. And only until I learned macros did I have
a particularly readable .emacs initfile.
One thing that rocks is incremental search. People think Moz is cool
for having it, but Emacs probably had it back when wood was the hyped
new material for building computers.
- No serious word-wrap which breaks up lines dynamically on word
boundaries, in text mode.
I personally don't care, but people do; they're used to centuries of
books which do try to break lines attractively and have a hard time
reading things formatted otherwise.
- Programming emacs leads to point moving around a lot.
I actually have no idea whether this is a good/bad/redherring thing.
I litter my code with lots of save-excursions. Maybe I haven't
thought about this enough.
- Tetris pieces are distorted.
I realize it's complicated to make tetris pieces that rotate nicely
when you need to use rectangles. Still.
- - - -
I do understand emacs is stretched since users require a program that
operates well in a purely text mode like over telnet.
From: Ray Dillinger
Subject: Re: Emacs newbies [Re: Which Emacs CL mode?}
Date:
Message-ID: <402FFA8F.FB49683B@sonic.net>
"Christopher C. Stacy" wrote:
> So let me start by asking Ray some questions....
>
> Ray> But I remember having to think about emacs commands, having to
> Ray> look stuff up on the reference card, being ecstatic when I finally
> Ray> found meta-x help and help apropos, stumbling across the "tutorial"
> Ray> by browsing files in a ten megabyte directory after struggling
> Ray> along in a crippled way for weeks not knowing more than about five
> Ray> of the key-combo commands, etc....
>
> When Emacs starts up, there's a menu bar with a "Help" menu.
> The first item is "Emacs Tutorial". Besides the basic commands,
> the tutorial teaches you how to run the self-documentation.
> The on-line manual is also accessible from the "Help" menu.
No menu bar. This was a non-xwindows emacs which was completely
unaware of the mouse. Similar emacses are available today as
emacs-nox or emacs -nw on many systems.
> But when all versions of Emacs start up, the first thing they
> display is a prominent "Help" message that tells you how to
> press the HELP key, get the tutorial, read the online manual,
> order the printed manual, and turn on the menu bar.
At the site where I learned emacs, it either expected the name
of a file to edit on the command line, or the first thing it did
was to ask what file you wanted to edit. This was the configuration
our sysadmin preferred. It didn't mention help; eventually I
discovered help by hitting the 'backspace' key twice in quick
succession. This was interpreted as control-h in the shell window,
and was a typo on my part; the semantics I wanted were bound to the
delete key instead. The result was that the file I was working on
disappeared and instead there was some help file.
> Ray> The sysadmin had it configured on that system so it didn't come
> Ray> up with any intro text or anything the way I've seen more modern
> Ray> emacses do, and preferred it that way. BTW, now that I've crawled
> Ray> up the learning curve, so do I.
>
> I can't quite tell from your wording whether you think that "modern"
> Emacs comes configured with the initial Help startup screen or not.
Modern emacses have a menu bar with the word "help" on it. I've
also seen emacses configured to come up with a throwaway buffer
that explains seven to ten of the most common and useful commands,
including help and apropos. Those are both ways to make emacs
a lot more newbie-friendly than emacs was when and where I learned
it.
> So I think the lesson here is that new users can be fully sabotaged
> by incompetent system administrators who decide that new users won't
> be wanting any of those bothersome "Help" messages!
Possibly. But as I said, I prefer much the same configuration now
that I'm up the learning curve, and had the sysadmin at that place
put help messages in the startup, they'd have been in the faces of a
lot of people who didn't need them. It's all part of the "get the hell
out of my way and let me do what I'm here to do" attitude that allows
expert users to be most efficient. And that is what emacs does in
spades, better than every other editor.
Bear
From: Christopher C. Stacy
Subject: Re: Emacs newbies [Re: Which Emacs CL mode?}
Date:
Message-ID: <uptcfvk9e.fsf@news.dtpq.com>
>>>>> On Sun, 15 Feb 2004 22:54:47 GMT, Ray Dillinger ("Ray") writes:
Ray> Possibly. But as I said, I prefer much the same configuration now
Ray> that I'm up the learning curve, and had the sysadmin at that place
Ray> put help messages in the startup,
That is: "left the help messages in place"
Ray> they'd have been in the faces of a lot of people who didn't need them.
Those users could be given an init file (or otherwise shared
the desired "expert" behaviour) without impacting other users.
There are zillions ways that could be implemented.
I also find emacs very ugly and TOO much complicated to configure.
I know it, as I have used emacs for a long time, but finally have
managed to forget it. When a tool requires a LOT of effort all the time
from your part to be fully configured, and there are alternatives which
comes all ready configured, up to date, and can be fully configurable
EASILY, then that tool is a piece of software which is no good anymore...
I think Lupo is right. The only reason to still using emacs is religius.
Emacs can do a lot of things. I have used it for reading and posting
news/mail, for writing my notes, for programming in C, even for editing
my configuration files. But there is at least one LUCID moment in every
emacs user when you see the light and ask him/her self: what in the hell
I'm doing? I'm wasting a lot of time configuring it, managing to make it
to work the way I need, and whattttsss, look for example at Mozilla
mail/news reader, it's much better, look at Anjuta/Kdevelop, it's much
better, just look at VIM (for editing configuration files/scripts), it's
much simpler and easier... what in the hell I'm doing???
The response is very simple: I still use emacs one time to another
because I like its filosofy... but trust me, it is the only good thing
that it have: filosofy, religius, or whatever you want to call it...
JabberWocky is a good piece of software. It may lack religius, but it is
much more visual, and there is nothing bad about being more visual. It
does have a lot of features, and they are all placed just one click away
from your mouse, which is good. It is easy to configure. You can
concentrate just on writing code. It probably increses your productivity.
These are just my opinions.
On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 05:25:25AM +0100, javuchi wrote:
> I also find emacs very ugly and TOO much complicated to configure.
> I know it, as I have used emacs for a long time, but finally have
> managed to forget it. When a tool requires a LOT of effort all the time
> from your part to be fully configured, and there are alternatives which
> comes all ready configured, up to date, and can be fully configurable
> EASILY, then that tool is a piece of software which is no good anymore...
>
> I think Lupo is right. The only reason to still using emacs is religius.
I disagree. I also use a lot of different editors for different tasks
(I am writing this in vim), but for coding I have not found a better
editor than Emacs. So far, I have not found another editor with the
same extensive functionality. Also, a beginner doesn't appreciate it,
but the fact is that having such a wealth of convenient key-bindings is
very important to being able to quickly produce and manipulate code.
Touting the mouse buttons and menu items available, or the fact that
screen real-estate is wasted on fancy graphical things, is a waste of
time as far as I am concerned; for these things are not helpful to me.
And calling my reasons `religious' is puerile; I find them to be quite
sound, and simply dismissing them demonstrates to me that your argument
(and whatever editor you are promoting) does not address my needs.
> JabberWocky is a good piece of software. It may lack religius, but it is
> much more visual, and there is nothing bad about being more visual. It
> does have a lot of features, and they are all placed just one click away
> from your mouse, which is good. It is easy to configure. You can
> concentrate just on writing code. It probably increses your productivity.
This is your fundamental mistake. You assume that there is nothing bad
about being more visual. The fact is that the keyboard is a more
efficient input device than the mouse when it comes to most complex
tasks. Using the mouse takes your hand off the keyboard. I have the
ability to touch-type quickly; why should I be restricted to stodgy
point-and-click interfaces? Is touch-typing still considered a
desirable skill?
Do you understand now why someone might prefer an editor like Emacs over
something that must be mouse-driven?
--
; Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu>
; OpenPGP public key: C24B6010 on keyring.debian.org
; Signed or encrypted mail welcome.
; "There is no dark side of the moon really; matter of fact, it's all dark."
Matthew Danish wrote:
> I disagree. I also use a lot of different editors for different tasks
> (I am writing this in vim), but for coding I have not found a better
> editor than Emacs. So far, I have not found another editor with the
> same extensive functionality.
Perhaps because other good editors do not need to be extended, as they
work all of its fullness for the task for which they have been designed.
> Also, a beginner doesn't appreciate it,
> but the fact is that having such a wealth of convenient key-bindings is
> very important to being able to quickly produce and manipulate code.
Does this mean that emacs is the ONLY editor with keybindings?
I can use, for example, Anjuta, without having to use my mouse.
> Touting the mouse buttons and menu items available, or the fact that
> screen real-estate is wasted on fancy graphical things, is a waste of
> time as far as I am concerned;
I insist: you can still use your keyboard with other editors. But using
the mouse is right for a lot of things, for example, for navigating
trought your class visualy (a good thing!), to configure it (I prefer
using my mouse that having to manage with so difficult scripts), etc.
> And calling my reasons `religious' is puerile; I find them to be quite
> sound, and simply dismissing them demonstrates to me that your argument
> (and whatever editor you are promoting) does not address my needs.
Perhaps because your needs are somewhat too much religious...
> You assume that there is nothing bad
> about being more visual.
Of course I do.
> The fact is that the keyboard is a more
> efficient input device than the mouse when it comes to most complex
> tasks. Using the mouse takes your hand off the keyboard. I have the
> ability to touch-type quickly; why should I be restricted to stodgy
> point-and-click interfaces? Is touch-typing still considered a
> desirable skill?
You can still use your keyboard if you want.
> Do you understand now why someone might prefer an editor like Emacs over
> something that must be mouse-driven?
"must be"????
Ok, lets analyze, for example, Jabberwocky:
http://jabberwocky.sourceforge.net/actions.html#actionssortedbykeysequence
Have enought?
The rest of the things which do not have a keybinding is because you use
them so little that there is need for such a keybinding. This is nice, I
just prefer to configure the application with my mouse and use it with
the keyboard.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Matthew Danish wrote:
>
> > I disagree. I also use a lot of different editors for different tasks
> > (I am writing this in vim), but for coding I have not found a better
> > editor than Emacs. So far, I have not found another editor with the
> > same extensive functionality.
>
> Perhaps because other good editors do not need to be extended, as they
> work all of its fullness for the task for which they have been
> designed.
That is quite unlikely.
> > Touting the mouse buttons and menu items available, or the fact that
> > screen real-estate is wasted on fancy graphical things, is a waste of
> > time as far as I am concerned;
>
> I insist: you can still use your keyboard with other editors. But
> using the mouse is right for a lot of things, for example, for
> navigating trought your class visualy (a good thing!), to configure it
> (I prefer using my mouse that having to manage with so difficult
> scripts), etc.
I insist that you keep your mouse to yourself. I'd rather not use one
at all while coding, it gets in the way. A good editor will allow
those who like mice to use them, while at the same time allowing those
who don't to avoid them. How many of your other editors do the same-
and run in a plain text tty or in full GUI mode? Not too many. I
like Emacs because I can have the same bindings for the same editor on
Windows, Solaris, OSX, Linux, and on tty as well. The vi people, poor
souls, would probably say something similar if they could be heard
over the continuous beeping of their terminals...
>
> > And calling my reasons `religious' is puerile; I find them to be quite
> > sound, and simply dismissing them demonstrates to me that your argument
> > (and whatever editor you are promoting) does not address my needs.
>
> Perhaps because your needs are somewhat too much religious...
Your perspective on visual interfaces and mice seems a bit religious
as well.
> > You assume that there is nothing bad
> > about being more visual.
>
> Of course I do.
>
> > The fact is that the keyboard is a more
> > efficient input device than the mouse when it comes to most complex
> > tasks. Using the mouse takes your hand off the keyboard. I have the
> > ability to touch-type quickly; why should I be restricted to stodgy
> > point-and-click interfaces? Is touch-typing still considered a
> > desirable skill?
>
> You can still use your keyboard if you want.
Why do you set yourself up as a judge of user interface effectiveness
and the motivations and preferences of their users?
>
> > Do you understand now why someone might prefer an editor like Emacs over
> > something that must be mouse-driven?
>
> "must be"????
>
>
> Ok, lets analyze, for example, Jabberwocky:
>
> http://jabberwocky.sourceforge.net/actions.html#actionssortedbykeysequence
>
> Have enought?
> The rest of the things which do not have a keybinding is because you
> use them so little that there is need for such a keybinding. This is
> nice, I just prefer to configure the application with my mouse and use
> it with the keyboard.
WTFC? You like IDE's? Great, knock yourself out- just don't get any
on me. I'm a heck of a lot more productive with a couple emacs
windows open, a couple xterms and a next/previous window keybinding to
flip between them than I've ever been in an IDE. Your needs &
preferences are different from mine- thats why there are different
tools.
Gregm
Greg Menke wrote:
> I insist that you keep your mouse to yourself. I'd rather not use one
> at all while coding, it gets in the way. A good editor will allow
> those who like mice to use them, while at the same time allowing those
> who don't to avoid them.
That affirmation seems to be quite radical. I feel that the good thing
is to use mouse when you want and use the keyboard also when you want.
Mouse clicks might me slower in some cases, but it is much, much faster
in some other ones. For example, I can create a new project for C using
GTK and build its interface WITH ITS KEYBINDING in just some minutes. I
probably can build a full featured editor, which works in the way I want
in less time than you configuring emacs...
> How many of your other editors do the same-
> and run in a plain text tty or in full GUI mode?
But, do I need such a thing????
If i need a text editor for a terminal, then I run vim or even nano, or
joe, or whatever I want.
If I need to program a serius program, then I run a serius IDE.
I tend to use the correct tool at every moment.
> Not too many. I
> like Emacs because I can have the same bindings for the same editor on
> Windows, Solaris, OSX, Linux, and on tty as well.
Normaly, there is a convection about key bindings. I can, for example,
use Ctrl+x to cut a text in my Anjuta IDE and in Windows Notepad.
> The vi people, poor
> souls, would probably say something similar if they could be heard
> over the continuous beeping of their terminals...
I agree, and don't like vim.
> Your perspective on visual interfaces and mice seems a bit religious
> as well.
The difference is that I have a lot of programs using visual interfaces
and mices, and you have only one (or two) emacs.
>>You can still use your keyboard if you want.
> Why do you set yourself up as a judge of user interface effectiveness
> and the motivations and preferences of their users?
I have used emacs a lot. I have (tryed to) configure it a lot of times.
I managed even to produce useful code and work with it. But I've
discovered that I do my work faster with other visual tools, and don't
waste a lot of time in configuration and learning issues.
This is my own judge. I made it for me. You can do whatever you want...
> WTFC? You like IDE's? Great, knock yourself out- just don't get any
> on me.
Read above.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Greg Menke wrote:
>
> > I insist that you keep your mouse to yourself. I'd rather not use one
> > at all while coding, it gets in the way. A good editor will allow
> > those who like mice to use them, while at the same time allowing those
> > who don't to avoid them.
>
> That affirmation seems to be quite radical. I feel that the good thing
> is to use mouse when you want and use the keyboard also when you
> want. Mouse clicks might me slower in some cases, but it is much, much
> faster in some other ones. For example, I can create a new project for
> C using GTK and build its interface WITH ITS KEYBINDING in just some
> minutes. I probably can build a full featured editor, which works in
> the way I want in less time than you configuring emacs...
>
Have fun your way. I've not spent more than a minute or so over the
last month configuring emacs. The last time I ever spent a few
minutes doing it was updating stuff in my .emacs for version 21.
> > How many of your other editors do the same-
> > and run in a plain text tty or in full GUI mode?
>
> But, do I need such a thing????
I couldn't say- you have your own requirements. They are my
requirements, however.
> If i need a text editor for a terminal, then I run vim or even nano,
> or joe, or whatever I want.
> If I need to program a serius program, then I run a serius IDE.
> I tend to use the correct tool at every moment.
Please understand that your "correct" tool is not always the same as
mine for a given problem. You don't find Emacs easy to use or
configure? Too bad, but thats not Emacs's problem.
> > Not too many. I
> > like Emacs because I can have the same bindings for the same editor on
> > Windows, Solaris, OSX, Linux, and on tty as well.
>
> Normaly, there is a convection about key bindings. I can, for example,
> use Ctrl+x to cut a text in my Anjuta IDE and in Windows Notepad.
>
When I mean key bindings, I mean I want the same bindings for the 10
or so bindings I use most of all, and something I can remember for
others. Cut,Copy,Paste being similar barely begins to cover it.
> > The vi people, poor
> > souls, would probably say something similar if they could be heard
> > over the continuous beeping of their terminals...
>
> I agree, and don't like vim.
This was the part where you were supposed to laugh. Remember, a vi
user's idea of keybinding is to tie pieces of string around each of
the keys.
>
> > Your perspective on visual interfaces and mice seems a bit religious
> > as well.
>
> The difference is that I have a lot of programs using visual
> interfaces and mices, and you have only one (or two) emacs.
OK, then how about 4 emacs's and 4 terminals- or more? I can open as
many as you want- though I'd probably start moving windows to other
desktops at some point. I still won't need to use the mouse to switch
between them though.
>
> >>You can still use your keyboard if you want.
> > Why do you set yourself up as a judge of user interface effectiveness
> > and the motivations and preferences of their users?
>
> I have used emacs a lot. I have (tryed to) configure it a lot of
> times. I managed even to produce useful code and work with it. But
> I've discovered that I do my work faster with other visual tools, and
> don't waste a lot of time in configuration and learning issues.
> This is my own judge. I made it for me. You can do whatever you want...
>
Your problems configuring Emacs do not lie with Emacs. Its not
particularly newbie-friendly, but its is very experienced-user
friendly. You have to approach it knowing you don't know a damn thing
about how to make it go, you have to start over nearly from scratch-
which can be hard if you're fluent in some other editor. Is the
investment worth it? For me, absolutely. I've not found another
editor since Brief back in my DOS days that I could stand using, until
I found Emacs.
Gregm
On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 04:22:22PM +0100, javuchi wrote:
[snip]
You have serious problems with reading comprehension. Grab an English
dictionary, sit down and focus, and try to come up with a sensible
response. What you wrote sounds almost like you did not read what I
wrote, but rather that you read what you wanted to believe I wrote.
--
; Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu>
; OpenPGP public key: C24B6010 on keyring.debian.org
; Signed or encrypted mail welcome.
; "There is no dark side of the moon really; matter of fact, it's all dark."
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> The only reason to still using emacs is religious.
I can think of many other reasons.
1) Preference - de gustibus non disputandum est.
2) Habit - I've been using Emacs for over twenty years.
3) Learning curve - Why learn yet another editor?
I don't know how `religion' would apply here, though.
> But there is at least one LUCID moment in every emacs user when you
> see the light and ask him/her self: what in the hell I'm doing?
It does? That's news to me. I've had several moments when I've used
other tools -- awk, for example -- and ask myself `what the hell am I
doing?' when I could have done it with Emacs and a keyboard macro or
small Lisp script, but *never* the other way. Not once.
> Mozilla mail/news reader, it's much better, look at Anjuta/Kdevelop,
> it's much better, just look at VIM (for editing configuration
> files/scripts), it's much simpler and easier... what in the hell I'm
> doing???
I've seen those. I don't use them. They don't do exactly what I
want. Emacs does not do exactly what I want, either, but I can change
it so that it does. These other tools are generally not as
configurable. Even the tools that are configurable are not as
universal.
Can you edit Lisp code in the Mozilla mail reader? Can you merge code
from a newsgroup with a file in your IDE? I do these things.
> The response is very simple: I still use emacs one time to another
> because I like its filosofy... but trust me, it is the only good thing
> that it have: filosofy, religius, or whatever you want to call it...
I don't know what the `Emacs philosophy' is.
> JabberWocky is a good piece of software.
Perhaps so, but I don't need it.
> It may lack religius, but it is much more visual, and there is
> nothing bad about being more visual.
Nor is there anything ipso facto good about being more visual,
either. I turn off the visual buttons in Emacs because the screen
real-estate is put to better use without silly pictures.
> It does have a lot of features, and they are all placed just
> one click away from your mouse, which is good.
If you like that sort of thing, there are many add-ons to Emacs
that provide it. I have little need for a lot of those features, and
some features, like incremental regular-expression search, are not
amenable to tiny pictures.
> It is easy to configure.
I configured my emacs years ago.
> You can concentrate just on writing code.
I already do that.
> It probably increses your productivity.
I doubt it.
Joe Marshall wrote:
>>The only reason to still using emacs is religious.
>
>
> I can think of many other reasons.
> 1) Preference - de gustibus non disputandum est.
> 2) Habit - I've been using Emacs for over twenty years.
> 3) Learning curve - Why learn yet another editor?
> I don't know how `religion' would apply here, though.
1) Preference is a consecuency of the other twoo reasons:
2) Habit, the reason because religius people continues to still being
religius even if someones demonstrates them that they are wrong.
3) Learning curve, why to evoluzione? It's easyer for a religius man to
still think like 20 years ago.
> It does? That's news to me. I've had several moments when I've used
> other tools -- awk, for example -- and ask myself `what the hell am I
> doing?' when I could have done it with Emacs and a keyboard macro or
> small Lisp script, but *never* the other way. Not once.
There are macros in Jabberwocky, for example!!!
> I've seen those. I don't use them. They don't do exactly what I
> want. Emacs does not do exactly what I want, either, but I can change
> it so that it does. These other tools are generally not as
> configurable. Even the tools that are configurable are not as
> universal.
> Can you edit Lisp code in the Mozilla mail reader? Can you merge code
> from a newsgroup with a file in your IDE? I do these things.
I prefer to use just one specialized tool for every task I do. I prefer
to use Mozilla for reading news because it can do it very well, much
better than GNUS. I prefer to use a specialized editor for my code when
I code. I prefer to use XMMS to listen to my MP3/OGG, I never wanted
Emacs to do such a thing!!! Do you? Then you have no solution... you
have been lost into your religius...
> I don't know what the `Emacs philosophy' is.
Sure you know it.
>>It does have a lot of features, and they are all placed just
>>one click away from your mouse, which is good.
> If you like that sort of thing, there are many add-ons to Emacs
> that provide it.
They are too difficult to install and too difficult to configure and
very ugly to my eyes, and some of them tend to hung very offen.
>>It is easy to configure.
> I configured my emacs years ago.
I hope you don't lose you configuration files or you will be lost for
some weeks...
>>You can concentrate just on writing code.
> I already do that.
Of course, 20 years using emacs... you had enought time to build you own
editor in that time...
>>It probably increses your productivity.
> I doubt it.
Have a nice day (and emacs session), Joe.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Joe Marshall wrote:
>>> The only reason to still using emacs is religious.
>> I can think of many other reasons.
>> 1) Preference - de gustibus non disputandum est.
>> 2) Habit - I've been using Emacs for over twenty years.
>> 3) Learning curve - Why learn yet another editor?
>> I don't know how `religion' would apply here, though.
>
> 1) Preference is a consecuency of the other twoo reasons:
Preference is preference. I like chocolate more than vanilla. I like
the color blue more than I like the color yellow.
> 2) Habit, the reason because religius people continues to still being
> religius even if someones demonstrates them that they are wrong.
Religious people usually attribute that to `faith'. Non-religious
people have habits, too.
> 3) Learning curve, why to evoluzione? It's easyer for a religius man
> to still think like 20 years ago.
I do not understand the relevance of this statement.
Consider your keyboard. Are you religiously wedded to the QWERTY
layout? Would you seriously consider scrambling the keys for no
reason other than novelty? There is a certain amount of work that
goes into learning any new software tool. If the payoff is unlikely
to be as high as the hurdles, there is no rational reason to change.
This isn't religion, it's rational thought.
>> It does? That's news to me. I've had several moments when I've used
>> other tools -- awk, for example -- and ask myself `what the hell am I
>> doing?' when I could have done it with Emacs and a keyboard macro or
>> small Lisp script, but *never* the other way. Not once.
>
> There are macros in Jabberwocky, for example!!!
So? My point is that your assertion that `everyone at some time
wonders why he is using Emacs rather than something better' is
demonstrably false. I have wondered why I was using GNU Emacs rather
than Zwei (Lisp Machine Emacs).
>> I've seen those. I don't use them. They don't do exactly what I
>> want. Emacs does not do exactly what I want, either, but I can change
>> it so that it does. These other tools are generally not as
>> configurable. Even the tools that are configurable are not as
>> universal. Can you edit Lisp code in the Mozilla mail reader? Can
>> you merge code
>> from a newsgroup with a file in your IDE? I do these things.
>
> I prefer to use just one specialized tool for every task I do. I
> prefer to use Mozilla for reading news because it can do it very well,
> much better than GNUS. I prefer to use a specialized editor for my
> code when I code. I prefer to use XMMS to listen to my MP3/OGG, I
> never wanted Emacs to do such a thing!!! Do you?
I just said I did. I mail and post code, and I collaborate with
others via email. Emacs facilitates this because it can be both a
code editor *and* an email or gnus client.
> Then you have no solution... you have been lost into your
> religius...
I seem to have a solution. I edit my code with an email-capable
editor, I read my email with a code-capable editor. Where is the
problem?
>> I don't know what the `Emacs philosophy' is.
>
> Sure you know it.
Do you have some rationale for contradicting me? Why would I lie
about something so trivial?
>>>It does have a lot of features, and they are all placed just
>>> one click away from your mouse, which is good.
>> If you like that sort of thing, there are many add-ons to Emacs
>> that provide it.
>
> They are too difficult to install and too difficult to configure and
> very ugly to my eyes, and some of them tend to hung very offen.
Fair enough. I don't use them either.
>>> It is easy to configure.
>> I configured my emacs years ago.
>
> I hope you don't lose you configuration files or you will be lost for
> some weeks...
I have the same configuration on each of the computers I use, a copy
on a CD, and a copy on my web page. It's not going anywhere.
>>> You can concentrate just on writing code.
>> I already do that.
>
> Of course, 20 years using emacs... you had enought time to build you
> own editor in that time...
I wish. I've been doing other things than configuring my emacs these
past 20 years.
>>>It probably increses your productivity.
>> I doubt it.
>
> Have a nice day (and emacs session), Joe.
I will. Thank you. You, too.
Joe Marshall wrote:
>>Have a nice day (and emacs session), Joe.
> I will. Thank you. You, too.
The better thing about all of this is that we have the freedom to
choose. There were other times in which the only complete solution for
free Lisp programming was Emacs.
Bye.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> The better thing about all of this is that we have the freedom to
> choose. There were other times in which the only complete solution
> for free Lisp programming was Emacs.
Very true, good point. This is indeed a step forwards.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Joe Marshall wrote:
> >> The only reason to still using emacs is religious.
> > I can think of many other reasons.
> > 1) Preference - de gustibus non disputandum est.
> > 2) Habit - I've been using Emacs for over twenty years.
> > 3) Learning curve - Why learn yet another editor?
> > I don't know how `religion' would apply here, though.
>
> 1) Preference is a consecuency of the other twoo reasons:
> 2) Habit, the reason because religius people continues to still being
> religius even if someones demonstrates them that they are wrong.
> 3) Learning curve, why to evoluzione? It's easyer for a religius man
> to still think like 20 years ago.
Congratulations; you have insulted everyone religious
and everyone who uses Emacs, by caricaturing both. Here
are a few clues for you.
1. "Religious" is not a synonym for "irrational", no matter
how many people use it that way. So far as I have been
able to tell, Emacs users are no more likely than anyone
else to believe in gods or to engage in rituals or to
do any of the other things that are characteristic of
actual religion as opposed to "religion" as a pure,
content-free boo-word.
2. I have not seen any "demonstration", here or elsewhere,
that using Emacs is "wrong".
3. What's going on here is that a couple of people (one
of them being you) are saying that using Emacs is Wrong,
and no one should do it, and using Emacs is a sign of
being *shudder* "religious"; while some other people
(such as Joe) are saying that some people like to use
Emacs and find it very productive and there's no reason
to call them names and assume they're wrong.
One of those two behaviours sounds to me just like the
sort of intolerance stereotypically associated with
"religion". It's not the one you seem to think it is.
4. Something else that's going on here is that some quite
concrete and specific ways in which Jabberwocky is inferior
to Emacs have been pointed out, and you continue to assert
that there are *no* reasons for preferring Emacs other
than irrationality.
I seem to recall that a preference for unsupported assertions
and ignoring of facts is one of those things stereotypically
associated with "religion", too.
> I prefer to use just one specialized tool for every task I do. I
> prefer to use Mozilla for reading news because it can do it very well,
> much better than GNUS. I prefer to use a specialized editor for my
> code when I code. I prefer to use XMMS to listen to my MP3/OGG, I
> never wanted Emacs to do such a thing!!! Do you? Then you have no
> solution... you have been lost into your religius...
What was that you were saying about "preference" being a
consequence of habit and unwillingness to learn?
--
Gareth McCaughan
.sig under construc
Gareth McCaughan wrote:
> Congratulations; you have insulted everyone religious
> and everyone who uses Emacs, by caricaturing both. Here
> are a few clues for you.
First of all, I'm having a lot of fun about this... but understand that
we are sitting at the typical discussion which doesn't go to any place
(in spanish terms, sorry about my english).
I'll just clarify some things that you say I have said before, but in
fact I haven't:
> 2. I have not seen any "demonstration", here or elsewhere,
> that using Emacs is "wrong".
I have not said that using Emacs is wrong. I said that the people who
say that emacs is the best editor avaiable are wrong.
> 3. What's going on here is that a couple of people (one
> of them being you) are saying that using Emacs is Wrong,
Not at all.
> One of those two behaviours sounds to me just like the
> sort of intolerance stereotypically associated with
> "religion". It's not the one you seem to think it is.
Not for me, as I have used emacs.
> 4. Something else that's going on here is that some quite
> concrete and specific ways in which Jabberwocky is inferior
> to Emacs have been pointed out,
Inferior for what? For editing Lisp code? I doubt it. Have you used
Jabberwocky to say that?
> and you continue to assert
> that there are *no* reasons for preferring Emacs other
> than irrationality.
This is true, and is my opinion. Even if you don't like it, it is my
opinion. And it is the opinion of a lot of more people.
> I seem to recall that a preference for unsupported assertions
> and ignoring of facts is one of those things stereotypically
> associated with "religion", too.
I didn't ignore the facts. Elsewhere, your facts might not be my facts.
For example, religius people believe that the existence of god is a
fact, which might be wrong to other people.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Gareth McCaughan wrote:
>
> > Congratulations; you have insulted everyone religious
> > and everyone who uses Emacs, by caricaturing both. Here
> > are a few clues for you.
>
> First of all, I'm having a lot of fun about this...
Having fun is not sufficient justification for being obnoxious,
despite the opinions of ten thousand Usenet trolls.
> but understand
> that we are sitting at the typical discussion which doesn't go to any
> place (in spanish terms, sorry about my english).
> I'll just clarify some things that you say I have said before, but in
> fact I haven't:
>
> > 2. I have not seen any "demonstration", here or elsewhere,
> > that using Emacs is "wrong".
>
> I have not said that using Emacs is wrong.
You said:
| "The only reason to still using emacs is religius."
> I said that the people who
> say that emacs is the best editor avaiable are wrong.
You said:
| 2) Habit, the reason because religius people continues to still being
| religius even if someones demonstrates them that they are wrong.
and I'm afraid I'm unable to see what relevance that has
unless you were saying that using Emacs has been demonstrated
to be wrong, since the person you were addressing never
claimed that Emacs is the best editor, only that it's the
one he finds most useful.
> > 3. What's going on here is that a couple of people (one
> > of them being you) are saying that using Emacs is Wrong,
>
> Not at all.
>
> > One of those two behaviours sounds to me just like the
> > sort of intolerance stereotypically associated with
> > "religion". It's not the one you seem to think it is.
>
> Not for me, as I have used emacs.
Lots of fanatically religious people (in either the correct
or the common abusive Usenet sense) are converts; they are
often the most irrational and intolerant. I'm afraid that
the fact that you "have used emacs" doesn't in the least
demonstrate that what you are now saying about it is sensible.
> > 4. Something else that's going on here is that some quite
> > concrete and specific ways in which Jabberwocky is inferior
> > to Emacs have been pointed out,
>
> Inferior for what? For editing Lisp code? I doubt it. Have you used
> Jabberwocky to say that?
Eh? Why should *I* need to use Jabberwocky in order to say
that *other people* have pointed out deficiencies in it?
If your point is that I don't know they're right then,
indeed, that's so, but I've not seen those criticisms
answered.
> > and you continue to assert
> > that there are *no* reasons for preferring Emacs other
> > than irrationality.
>
> This is true, and is my opinion. Even if you don't like it, it is my
> opinion. And it is the opinion of a lot of more people.
And *you*'re criticizing *other people* for being "religious"?
Gosh.
> > I seem to recall that a preference for unsupported assertions
> > and ignoring of facts is one of those things stereotypically
> > associated with "religion", too.
>
> I didn't ignore the facts. Elsewhere, your facts might not be my
> facts. For example, religius people believe that the existence of god
> is a fact, which might be wrong to other people.
Either there is a god (or more than one god), or there is not.
That's not the kind of thing that can be true for some people
and false for others. However, "Emacs is the best tool for
editing Lisp programs" certainly *is* the kind of thing that
can be true for some and false for others -- but, e.g.,
"Jabberwocky doesn't have a balanced-parenthesis-close
operation, whereas Emacs does" and "Emacs has many more
facilities for editing and moving around s-expressions
than Jabberwocky has" are not.
--
Gareth McCaughan
.sig under construc
Gareth McCaughan <················@pobox.com> writes:
> Either there is a god (or more than one god), or there is not.
Or the amount of god changes over time.
--
~jrm
According to Joe Marshall <·············@comcast.net>:
> Gareth McCaughan <················@pobox.com> writes:
> > Either there is a god (or more than one god), or there is not.
>
> Or the amount of god changes over time.
This just came up in talk.origins:
www.godchecker.com
This one is very funny:
http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/african-mythology.php?deity=BUMBA&ds=N
According to the site, Mr Bumba is currently the top dog (sorry ;-) in
the African pantheon.
--
Ng Pheng Siong <····@netmemetic.com>
http://firewall.rulemaker.net -+- Firewall Change Management & Version Control
http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps -+- Open Source Python Crypto & SSL
Joe Marshall <·············@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<············@comcast.net>...
> Gareth McCaughan <················@pobox.com> writes:
> > Either there is a god (or more than one god), or there is not.
>
> Or the amount of god changes over time.
You know, you may think you are joking (though I guess any
sufficiently dry humor is indistinguishable from seriousness), but
people do wonder such things. Given some research, I could likely
find a bunch of old Jewish or Christian mystics who wondered about
God's rate of growth.
"God seems to be at an inflection point today. Must be tuesday."
···········@yahoo.com (Tayssir John Gabbour) writes:
> Joe Marshall <·············@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<············@comcast.net>...
> > Gareth McCaughan <················@pobox.com> writes:
> > > Either there is a god (or more than one god), or there is not.
> >
> > Or the amount of god changes over time.
>
> You know, you may think you are joking (though I guess any
> sufficiently dry humor is indistinguishable from seriousness), but
> people do wonder such things. Given some research, I could likely
> find a bunch of old Jewish or Christian mystics who wondered about
> God's rate of growth.
>
> "God seems to be at an inflection point today. Must be tuesday."
I figure that fiat divinity can be a real problem, at least in
combination with inflationary faith expansion.
Regards,
--
Nils G�sche
"Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."
PGP key ID 0x0655CFA0
Gareth McCaughan wrote:
> Having fun is not sufficient justification for being obnoxious,
> despite the opinions of ten thousand Usenet trolls.
This was funny until 2 or 3 messages above. Now this is not funny, and I
don't want to discusse anymore. :(
If I finally start my Lisp project I'll use Jabberwocky. It's just my
choose.
Bye.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> If I finally start my Lisp project I'll use Jabberwocky. It's just my
> choose.
Choice :-)
I understand that you don't like emacs, although I definately like
it.
I've always thought that there ought to be an alternative. It is nice
to know that Jabberwocky has gone so far. Nobody is telling you to
drop it and use emacs instead, nobody is going to attack you because
you use Jabberwocky, so relax.
Mucha suerte con tus proyectos en Lisp.
Mario S. Mommer <········@yahoo.com> writes:
> I understand that you don't like emacs, although I definately like
> it.
>
> I've always thought that there ought to be an alternative. It is nice
By the way, there may be more alternatives than people are aware of,
such as Hemlock and the Allegro CL/LispWorks/MCL/Corman Lisp IDEs.
Paolo
--
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> writes:
> By the way, there may be more alternatives than people are aware of,
> such as Hemlock and the Allegro CL/LispWorks/MCL/Corman Lisp IDEs.
And then there's j (http://armedbear-j.sourceforge.net/) which is
extensible in CL.
Andras
javuchi wrote:
>> and you continue to assert
>> that there are *no* reasons for preferring Emacs other
>> than irrationality.
>
>
> This is true, and is my opinion. Even if you don't like it, it is my
> opinion. And it is the opinion of a lot of more people.
>
There *is* at least one good reason to prefer Emacs (compared to -- say
Jabberwocky). If the only thing I ever do with computer is to write CL
code, than maybe Jabberwocky would do it for me, but:
I also use Scheme (much more that CL) -- can Jabberwocky do that?
I also use Logo (UCBLogo) -- can Jabberwocky do that? To answer right
away -- NO, and not very likely in the future either. Actually Emacs is
the *only* editor that can do Logo. (the reason is that ucblogo uses
SETCURSOR, therefore any editor handling Logo output in the inferior
process buffer *must* be able to handle non sequential two-dimensional
output.
I also use from time to time Haskell, Ml, Caml, Icon ... and guess what?
Which editor has special modes written for all those? Jabberwocky, or
maybe Emacs???
Another thing: even if you use language that comes with it's own IDE
(like DrScheme) guess what did the designers model the editor commands
on: Jabberwocky, or maybe (just maybe) Emacs? What do you think? :-)
-- Hrvoje
Hrvoje Blazevic <······@despammed.com> writes:
> I also use from time to time Haskell, Ml, Caml, Icon ... and guess
> what? Which editor has special modes written for all those?
> Jabberwocky, or maybe Emacs???
The only "strange" language I use is L.S.E. Has Jabberwocky a mode to
handle it? I guess not. But emacs has it because I tool half an hour
to make a LSE emacs mode.
Can users write new language modes for Jabberwocky? Including
colorized syntax, random automatic stuff, like automatic line
numbering or parenthesis insertions, etc, and glyph substitutions (in
LSE, the underline must be represented as a left arrow, in lisp, the
symbol lambda must be represented as a greek lambda letter, etc)?
--
__Pascal_Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he doesn't
want merely because you think it would be good for him.--Robert Heinlein
http://www.theadvocates.org/
On 8651 day of my life ······@nospam.com wrote:
> I prefer to use just one specialized tool for every task I do. I
> prefer to use Mozilla for reading news because it can do it very
> well, much better than GNUS.
So,
1. Does Mozilla have scoring? For example, if I don't want to see
any thread started by javuchi, I can do it with 2 keypressings.
Can you filter messages from me?
2. Can I type Cyrillic letter and then Spanish letter and then
Esperanto letter in Mozilla without weird tweaking of X Window
System? Within Emacs, I can. And I don't need any customization.
3. Does Mozilla work in tty? Yes, I really need tty support.
4. And is Mozilla as customizable as Gnus? For example, I need
different citing style in fido7 USENET hierarchy and different
citing style in other groups. I have to insert special headers
for some groups or maillists... Can Mozilla spellcheck your
message before posting *automatically* with different dictionaries
depending on group? (You make lot of typos, BTW.) Etc. etc. etc.
I can't read mail and news with simple tools. Because life is
complex. And Mozilla Mail just suxx. It is good for office workers
who only send mails to coworkers and receive mails from them. But it
is not for Real World.
Emacs users spend lot of time customizing The Editor because they
*can* customize it. And Mozilla/Jabberwocky users do not customize
their tools because they can't... So, with Emacs you can either
customize or not, but with Mozilla/Jabberwocky you have no such a
choice... But I prefer to have a choice.
--
Ivan Boldyrev
| recursion, n:
| See recursion
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> It does have a lot of features, and they are all placed just
> one click away from your mouse, which is good.
You know, some people can't stand editors that fail to provide quick,
efficient keyboard shortcuts for everything, because for some of us,
mousing *hurts*.
(And even before it hurt, it was irritatingly slow.)
--
Chris Jeris ······@oinvzer.net Apply (1 6 2 4)(3 7) to domain to reply.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> wrote on Wed, 11 Feb 2004 05:25:25 +0100:
>
> I also find emacs very ugly and TOO much complicated to configure.
> I know it, as I have used emacs for a long time, but finally have
> managed to forget it. When a tool requires a LOT of effort all the
> time from your part to be fully configured,
You've got to be kidding me. You need to configure your Emacs
continually? Why?
My Emacs configuration has *grown* a lot over the past few years and
it would have been hell to figure it all out on the first day of using
it. But you don't have to and trying to do so is IMHO not the right
way to approach Emacs.
Besides that, the occasional configuring I do (once every two months
or so) is cutting and pasting a line from documentation or a readme to
my dot-emacs file when I want to try out a new package.
With Debian this is even less of the issue it already was.
> Emacs can do a lot of things. I have used it for reading and posting
> news/mail, for writing my notes, for programming in C, even for
> editing my configuration files. But there is at least one LUCID
> moment in every emacs user when you see the light and ask him/her
> self: what in the hell I'm doing?
Funny, my lucid moment was realizing that I spent the majority of my
time displaying, reading and editing text, whether it's coding,
writing, chatting or using mail / news. Why would I want to do that
in five slightly (and sometimes not so slightly) different ways?
Emacs offers me one way to do all those things without a loss of
functionality (in fact, it adds a lot[1]) at the price of, admittedly,
some initial configuring.
I don't mind jumping that one hurdle if it means avoiding getting
wacked in the nuts by other hurdles all the time.
> JabberWocky is a good piece of software. It may lack religius, but
> it is much more visual, and there is nothing bad about being more
> visual.
>
> It does have a lot of features, and they are all placed just one
> click away from your mouse, which is good.
Editing text is not a game. I only have my hand on the mouse
full-time when I'm playing a first-person shooter.
All the features I need in my text editor are one keypress away.
Besides that, buttons waste screen estate and I fucking hate that.
I'd rather waste a few extra seconds starting up a program I only use
twice a day or getting to a rarely used function than having to look
at a cute/funny/bloody annoying button that takes up space that could
have been used for watching porn^W^W editing a line of Lisp code.
*pants*
> These are just my opinions.
Ofcourse. These were mine, thanks for the entertainment.
cheers,
Erik
[1] For example: I can use the same fully fledged environment on Unix,
Windows, Mac in a GUI or when SSH'd into a console. As a free-
lancer working on different sites this was very important for me.
--
"Tooltips are the proof that icons don't work." -- Stefaan A. Eeckels
Erik Winkels <·······@xs4all.nl> writes:
> Funny, my lucid moment was realizing that I spent the majority of my
> time displaying, reading and editing text, whether it's coding,
> writing, chatting or using mail / news. Why would I want to do that
> in five slightly (and sometimes not so slightly) different ways?
Right. If anything, I'd like even MORE of Emacs. Every editable text
field *everywhere* could be an Emacs buffer. (Cue LispM story.)
--
Lars Brinkhoff, Services for Unix, Linux, GCC, HTTP
Brinkhoff Consulting http://www.brinkhoff.se/
Erik Winkels wrote:
> Besides that, buttons waste screen estate and I fucking hate that.
> I'd rather waste a few extra seconds starting up a program I only use
> twice a day or getting to a rarely used function than having to look
> at a cute/funny/bloody annoying button that takes up space that could
> have been used for watching porn^W^W editing a line of Lisp code.
Floating pannels is a nice feature of most modern GUIS, wich allows to
hide the toolbar. Jabberwocky does have this, Anjuta does have this,
Kdevelop does have this......
And all of the editors comes with keybindings.
Have fun.
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> Erik Winkels wrote:
>
> > Besides that, buttons waste screen estate and I fucking hate that.
> > I'd rather waste a few extra seconds starting up a program I only use
> > twice a day or getting to a rarely used function than having to look
> > at a cute/funny/bloody annoying button that takes up space that could
> > have been used for watching porn^W^W editing a line of Lisp code.
>
> Floating pannels is a nice feature of most modern GUIS, wich allows to
> hide the toolbar. Jabberwocky does have this, Anjuta does have this,
> Kdevelop does have this......
> And all of the editors comes with keybindings.
NOw, I do wonder. Why are you arguing so violently against emacs?
It's a decent editor. It happens to be my main editor (for historical
reasons) but I use at least two other editors on a frequent basis
(sedit, in exmh, for composing email; vi, for changing config files
not in the work version-control system) and some others on a
less-frequent basis (ed, for scripted unattended edits; notepad for
bare-bones editing in windows).
I could probably change editor, but I'd prefer changing to one that is
keystroke-compatible with what I know already (16 years breeds deep
habits) and at that point, I don't see a massive need to, since
anything that is keystroke-compatible and probably (note, this is a
guess, but it is based on some previous attempts to change editor)
offers less configurability and programmability just isn't worth the
effort.
Had I started editing code today or been actively unhappy with my
editing environment, I would probably have picked up another editor.
//Ingvar (I don't *feel* religiously attached to my editor!)
--
(defun p(i d)(cond((not i)(terpri))((car i)(let((l(cadr i))(d(nthcdr(car i)d
)))(princ(elt(string(car d))l))(p(cddr i)d)))(t(princ #\space)(p(cdr i)d))))
(p'(76 2 1 3 1 4 1 6()0 5()16 10 0 7 0 8 0 9()2 6 0 0 12 4 23 4 1 4 8 8)(sort
(loop for x being the external-symbols in :cl collect (string x)) #'string<))
javuchi <······@nospam.com> writes:
> for editing my configuration files. But there is at least one LUCID
> moment in every emacs user when you see the light and ask him/her
> self: what in the hell I'm doing? I'm wasting a lot of time
Although utter rubbish as written, after the substitution of
"comp.lang.lisp reader" for "emacs user" here it actually makes a
pretty good question. What the hell _am_ I doing?
-dan
--
"please make sure that the person is your friend before you confirm"
Daniel Barlow <···@telent.net> wrote in message news:<··············@noetbook.telent.net>...
> Although utter rubbish as written, after the substitution of
> "comp.lang.lisp reader" for "emacs user" here it actually makes a
> pretty good question. What the hell _am_ I doing?
Preventing the sky from falling.
"Lupo LeBoucher" <··@io.com> wrote in message
···························@io.com...
> >> 5) Proper use of the screen (i.e. it doesn't assume you're running
> >> on a 80 character wide monochrome terminal)
> >
> >Neither does Emacs. You must be running a really old version of Emacs.
> >Not only do I edit with balanced parentheses, automatic indentation, and
> >syntax coloring, but I can also insert (say) Japanese text and save it
> >in a variety of encodings.
>
> In an 80-character wide window, meant to fit on a freaking Z-19 terminal.
> My screen is rather bigger than that. It even has the opposite aspect
> ratio (assuming I'm not confusing my Z-19's with my tektronics term).
>
> Jabberwocky fills up the screen with useful information. Emacs wastes the
> screen and hides useful information.
Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm having a hard time seeing how a
properly configurated Emacs would waste the screen.
For example, the screenshot on the SLIME page on CLiki
(http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/images/more-slime.png) doesn't seem to
show anything useless (although I'd rather use the left part of the screen
for code only).
> If you're the type of person who thinks ctrl-b and ctrl-f makes more sense
> than arrow keys, you're perfectly able to remap the keybindings to make it
> so. I can't help it if your hooks can't find the arrow keys; mine never
> had a problem with it, even when using vastly different keyboards.
> I find it annoying when emacs doesn't know about arrow keys, which
> occasionally seems to happen. Presumably because it assumes a terminal
> from the 1980s or before.
C-b and C-f (and others) don't "make more sense" than arrow keys, they are
simply more efficient. If you want efficiency, then I don't think you should
care about any key or device that requires moving your hands.
--
Matthieu Villeneuve
In article <·····················@mapcar.org>,
Matthew Danish <·······@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>
>> 6) You don't have to know lisp to use it (one of the dumb things about emacs +
>> ilisp is that you have to know lisp to *set it up* -think about that for a
>> second)
>
>apt-get install cmucl-normal emacs21 ilisp
Please, what is that line? Is it something I enter somewhere?
Could you explain it a bit? Thanks!
>No lisp knowledge needed. (And if you don't use Debian then (a) XEmacs
>comes with ILISP (b) if you can read a README then you can install any
>Emacs package, it usually just requires cutting and pasting a few lines
>from the guide into your ~/.emacs. Not a big deal, IMHO).
>
>
>> 10) Vaguely MSVC++ -like project manager thingee
>
>Can't stand those things. And the Jabberwocky method doesn't look too
>wonderful either, being based on directory structure and such. I think
>ASDF is simple and powerful enough.
And, what is "ASDF"?
(Interesting thread, this is.)
Thanks!
David
In article <··············@ulm.my.lan>, Klaus Uhl <····@u-h-l.de> wrote:
>-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>·······@panix.com (David Combs) writes:
>
>>>apt-get install cmucl-normal emacs21 ilisp
>>
>> Please, what is that line? Is it something I enter somewhere?
>> Could you explain it a bit? Thanks!
>
...
>
>(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :application-package-name)
>
>Isn't this easy?
>
>Think of ASDF as a "make" facility for Lisp.
>
>- Klaus
>
Yep, nice indeed! Nor it nor anything like it available on Solaris,
I guess.
(Belated) Thanks for the great info.
David
··@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) writes:
> How did I know this was going to happen?
> How I hate religious people.
Damn, you don't have the best reading comprehension, do you?
> >Wow, with such a measured, unemotional, nonabusive, informative
> >recommendation as this, I'm jumping at the thought of trying those
> >great advantages you mentioned. Oh wait, you didn't mention any, did
> >you particle-monkey?
>
> I don't care if you use punched cards or drink the hemlock kool-aide (and it's
> 'Chaos-monkey,' ya little ass-hat).
>
> You're still an idiot for spouting on against a piece of software you've never
> used simply because you've devoted your life to an editor that should have been
> put out the pasture in the 1980s.
Go reread what I wrote. Seriously, try reading the words that are
there, if that's not too much of a streach for you. You might want to
take some deep breaths and wipe the spittle off the screen so you can
get a good look. Does your response have anything to do with what I
wrote? Hey, look at that, you're arguing with phatoms inside your own
little pea brain.
> Wow; a Berkeley pinko -how original.
East Side Oakland, ya buster, in the dubs.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
··@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) writes:
> However, Jabberwocky is *better* -it is not trivially better: it is lots better.
> Jabberwocky is so much better, it's not even really comparable. My main
> complaint is that it is slower.
I will test this tomorrow. I've seen some screenshots and seems to be great.
Elsewhere it has been made in java, which sound somewhat strange....
javuchi.
··@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) writes:
> Jabberwocky is so much better, it's not even really comparable. My main
> complaint is that it is slower.
This is nonsense for me. It crashes regularly. Regular crashes can not
make for a good product. YMMV and feel feee to use what you like but
don't tell others not to use what they found more useful.
Friedrich
In article <······················@io.com>, Lupo LeBoucher <··@io.com> wrote:
> I found SLIME to work better than ILISP with xemacs at least.
>
> However, I found Jabberwocky to be much slicker and work better than
> anything to
> do with emacs.
>
> http://jabberwocky.sourceforge.net/
>
> Keystrokes and mouse clicks are better than
> M-x bannanna-fanna-fo-fanna
(This is directed at people other than Lupo, since he's made up his
mind.)
I'm all in favor of people finding the best thing for them. I typically
use vim for most editing - it works best for me.
However, I would strongly recommend that you at least try to work with
Emacs, and *especially* work with its sexp-manipulation commands. These
save so much time it's nuts, and I can't imagine writing Lisp in an
editor that doesn't have them or equivalents.
For some examples, see:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=d6d7ef84.fsf%40ccs.neu.edu
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=TqZgb.705807%24YN5.575556%40sccrnsc01
If you still don't like it knowing the above, definitely look for
something that suits you better.
[Disclaimer: Jabberwocky may have similar commands - I don't know. I
don't actually like Emacs very much for non-Lisp syntax languages. I
use FSF Emacs, not XEmacs.]
-bcd
--
*** Brian Downing <bdowning at lavos dot net>