On Jun 23, 2:04 am, Robert Uhl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Of course, emacs doesn't take years of mastery. It takes 30, 40 > minutes.
I gave it twice that, and it failed to grow on me in that amount of time. > > Besides, ANY interface that involves fumbling around in the dark > > trying to find a light switch is clunky. > > That sounds like vi, not emacs. That sounds like any application where you need to read the help, but "f1" does not bring up a separate help window, switchable with the main one using alt-tab or the mouse, and navigable using arrows, pageup, pagedn, and the mouse. The result of that is invariably that when the document has the focus, the help is open to "help on switching windows" rather than whatever you need it to be on once the document has the focus. You can read the help on doing what you want to do with the document, but to apply it you need to transfer focus back to the document. If doing that isn't second-nature, you have to navigate the help away from where you need it to get the focus back to the document. Now the focus is on the document, but the help you need isn't displayed next to it anymore. Frustrating? You can't begin to imagine, I suspect. Apparently, some people are born somehow able to avoid this problem without having to memorize one or the other piece of help. You're clearly one of those. I am equally clearly NOT one of those. Of course, if emacs let you keep THREE windows open and visible at the same time, instead of being limited to one or a horizontally split two ... and a cramped 80x10 or so each, at that ... > > Applications that not only eschew normal methods of navigation of the > > interface, but force you to fumble your way between the help and the > > task you're trying to do, are definitely clunky. > > a) emacs doesn't 'eschew normal methods of navigation'; it's been doing > its own thing since before there _were_ Mac OS or Windows I'll admit that it didn't USED TO 'eschew normal methods of navigation', but at a certain point in time there began to be 'normal methods of navigation' and emacs naturally began eschewing them promptly and has done so ever since. > b) I believe you've never used the emacs tutorial, which is quite > definitely designed for you _not_ to have to fumble around between > windows If I haven't, it must be the case that finding this tutorial (or even discovering that it exists) was nontrivial, or it wasn't built into emacs, one or the other. My memory is somewhat fuzzy after all these years so you'll forgive me if I don't make a definite statement about which. On the flip side, if I have, the tutorial can't have been all it's cracked up to be. Especially given I can program Java proficiently, including some fairly sophisticated network-using tools, and clearly am not an idiot or untalented in technically demanding areas involving substantial amounts of arcana. Of course, I might have put more effort into learning effective Java; effort like that in learning some language is necessary to being a programmer. Thanks to modern editors and IDEs, putting a comparable amount into learning the mere mechanics of operating a text editor is not necessary, and I chose to spend the time and effort elsewhere, where it was necessary, such as on learning a programming language. The technical term for managing limited resources, such as time and effort, first where needed and never where avoidable, is "efficiency", in case you were unaware. > > The interface never improved over that time -- the biggest problem > > consistently being that whenever focus was successfully transferred to > > the document window, the help window was invariably open to the > > instructions for switching windows, so you could never be doing > > something with the document and have the help for that something > > available at a glance. > > That doesn't even make sense. Either your memory is faulty Impossible > you've never actually used emacs Untrue > or you're just making things up. Also untrue, and you've just accused me of incompetence once and of lying twice, which in a formerly civil discussion constitutes behavior that I consider to be in poor taste. > If I'm browsing the manual > online, I can switch from said manual to my document buffer without > making the manual scroll to the documentation for switch-to-buffer. Apparently because you find the switch second nature, despite its not being the obvious (which is ctrl-tab, to switch between documents in an MDI app). Cheat sheet? Memorized with painstaking months of hard effort? Thanks for proving my point, either way. > In fact, I am not aware of any package which auto-changes the *info* or > *Help* buffers to reflect the last keyboard command. I didn't say it auto-changes. It manual-changes. The exact sequence of events that causes this with a novice user being: * Need to do X, and the usual command doesn't work (e.g. go to save document and get search prompt) * Now nothing much works (typing stuff bleeps), hit esc a bunch of times * Now it complains of hitting esc too many times, but typing into the document at least works again * OK, time to resort to *gulp* the help. * Oh, great, now what did it do? I hit F1 and ... * Eh. Try random stuff. Help starts with h. Alt-h? Ctrl-h? ... * Oh, right. I seem to remember the help popping up unwanted when I tried to backspace over a typo earlier, so I'll just do that. * Hrm, now how to search the bloody thing? * <Hours pass, some spent trying ctrl+f and ctrl+s, mostly fruitlessly, followed by a load of scrolling> * Ah. "How to do Foobar to your open document". Perfect! * Oh crap. How do I do anything to my open document, when the focus is on the help instead of the document? * <Scrolling for ten minutes> * Ah, I hit this. It worked! * Oh, fudge. Where did "How to do Foobar to your open document" go? The help's open to "How to switch windows". For shame. * Switch back, scroll ... there it is. * Crap, now I don't remember how to put the focus back on the document window. * More scrolling. * Oh, fudge. Where did "How to do Foobar to your open document" go? The help's open to "How to switch windows". For shame. * <however many repetitions of the preceding 4 lines> * Error: Stack overflow. Dumping core. I trust you get the picture. [snip] Whoa, what did you just say? Page 899 of the ... good Christ. Er ... Run! Flee! It's a monster! Head for the hills! Sound the civil defense sirens, tornado TORNADO! *runs* > > Infrequently used commands you can stand to hunt for in menus. When > > you find you use one frequently, you can try to learn the keyboard > > shortcut -- and you can find it without even consulting the help, > > simply by finding the command's menu item. > > This is no different from emacs. There's a menu bar What are you blithering about? Oh, great, now I'm using the term "blithering". :P But ... WHAT menu bar? We're discussing emacs. As in, a text-mode editor. As in a cramped little 80x24 grid of letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation with no menus, no concept of a pointing device, and a bad attitude. Actually, the big thing the GUI and mouse did was rescue us from escalating UI problems with tasks complex enough to require modes. You needed either separate components with separate associated functionality and a "focus" to move among them, or you needed commands and keyboard-toggled modes. The former got you an emacs and the "can't switch back from the help" syndrome, and the latter got you ... something vile. Until the GUI-with-pointing device, which made user control of a "focus" a snap requiring virtually zero learning curve, and better yet, what little learning there was being transferred readily across applications. Unified windowing systems, with Macs and Windows, cemented the victory of the pointing device over the problem of focus management. Point at the thing you want to use next and click; that simple. A child can do it. Using a GUI is like doing a job yourself, such as washing the car. Using something from the dinosaur age, especially afterwards, feels like sitting back and directing some hired help. Help that happens to be blind as a bat as well as having the usual poor grasp of English. "Left, Senor. Right, Senor. No not THAT far right! Now you've gotten it all into the open drivers-side window, and those documents I left on the front seat are ruined!" Ouch. Yet trying to control old text-mode tools is pretty much exactly the same, only the flawless English it speaks belies an even dodgier grasp of same, or even the need to speak to it in some obscure dialect of Greek full of "meta" instead...and it doesn't apologize when there's a screwup a more hands-on interface would easily have prevented. If you want a job right, do it yourself. With a mouse, you can; no need to speak an obscure variant of Swahili into a keyboard just to get the focus to the document from the help or wherever. And to top it off, every Windows app understands tab and alt-tab and most understand ctrl-tab. Actually, the OS GUI components themselves understand alt- tab, and the applications just get told the focus went elsewhere or came back, making it one less area for application designers to screw things up. (All too often, they screw up ctrl-tab in tabbed/MDI apps, or screw up tab by using a dodgy tab order or controls with no visual indication of focus, mind. And then you can just resort to the mouse, rather than throw up your hands or find something non-electronic to sob into so as to avoid ruining another $40 keyboard.) > You've actually hit on another advantage of emacs: consider emacs itself > as an operating system hosting multiple applications, in which the vast > majority of commands are the same. It's an "operating system" to precisely the extent Windows 3.1 was. It's like Windows 3.1 in a number of other ways too, including size and aesthetics, though not stability. Even more like its predecessor DOSShell. Take that however you wish. At least Windows 3.1 had most apps have the same keys for the vast majority of commands, and those were the right keys. Emacs has all the applications have the vast majority of their commands use the same WRONG keys. Including whatever you'd use to rebind them. And the help you'd use to find out what the damn keys are in the first place. ;) And let's not forget that to someone with a 17" LCD monitor and a blisteringly fast graphics card, 80x24 text in a terminal emulator is somewhat underwhelming, and doesn't provide anything like the information density needed to make truly complex software interfaces usable. The human optic nerves have about 100Mbps of bandwidth *each*; that's a couple of ethernet cables directly into the cortex. Even a large, high resolution, big-color-gamut display with a decent refresh rate doesn't use more than a fraction of that capacity to deliver information to the user, even when the display is used to maximum advantage by the software to provide state information and navigation cues (and document views!). Those dim old greenly-glowing 80x24 terminals flickering at 20-odd Hz, by contrast ... barely adequate to design their own replacements on, though necessary for same. It's a good thing some people are apparently very good at maintaining most of the state information in their head that that tiny little box of text isn't displaying to them, and "reading between the lines" to make use of even fairly complex applications through such a tiny interface. Or those replacements might never have been built. > I can use the same text-editing > commands for reading & writing emails, reading & writing Usenet posts, > reading & writing code, browsing the web, organising my schedule and so > forth. I'm not sure that's such an advantage. Sometimes, unifying tasks too much creates security holes, especially when some of those tasks are network-facing and some are not. Some proposed or actual Windows features result in an unclear boundary between "my computer" and "the net out there", and that's bound to result in leaked passwords and credit-card numbers and all manner of other accidental breaches, as well as enable a variety of new social engineering attacks to purposely compromise more of the same. Phishing and similar attacks already pose a problem, but if the "phishing" looks like it's local applications or content instead of online, it's even more likely to be mistakenly trusted. One sometimes wonders if Microsoft has more sinister motives than "get rich with as shoddy and cheap a product as possible" in light of things like this. I do hope the unified stuff you describe in emacs isn't the open source equivalent. There's frank danger in making it too easy to mix up local stuff and online stuff while at work at a computer. > The vast majority of what we do on a computer is reading & writing > text--wouldn't it be cool to have a full-fledged text editing > environment always available for that sort of thing? Define "we". It can't be "people", because a substantial fraction of people use computers heavily for image or even 3D manipulation, or sound, rather than text, or a mixture with text not predominant, and a much larger fraction use computers for absolutely nothing at all. "Programmers" maybe. Even so, some people program from time to time but do a lot of, say, image manipulation. I expect even most programmers like to be able to see what the heck they're doing, rather than resorting to fumbling around with a flashlight or grunting terse instructions to a blind butler with an IQ in the mid-zeros. > Wouldn't it be cool not to have one program implement search in one way, and > another a > second way, and yet another a third? Wouldn't it be cool to have access > to a proper text editor when editing text on a web page? Search is usually ctrl+f, type something, hit enter in my experience. And I can use any text editor I want to edit HTML. > That's how I learnt emacs. I was 13, and had only ever used Mac > software up until that point. I had a fairly limited command set > (basically, C-x C-f, C-x C-s & C-x C-c). That looks like three commands, although I can't be sure -- my Swahili is a little rusty from years of disuse. ;) I'd normally use at least eight -- open, save, quit, find/find next, replace, cut, copy, and paste. That's not counting arrows, page up, page down, del, backspace, and the like, and unixy tools don't let you take even THOSE for granted. And if I needed more, add help. Add the four arrows, page up, page down, delete-forwards, backspace, and help to the original eight and we now have 17 commands. I seriously doubt that your short chunk of Swahili up above encompasses all of them. > Do you realise that emacs has a GUI these days? I'm writing this in a > 70-line window, with gtk+ widgets. Which means full-resolution, > full-colour. What are you talking about? Clearly not emacs, which is a console app for unix systems (with the inevitable MS-DOS ports and others). Some sort of bastardized Windows port I suppose? I've seen the occasional attempt at a Windows port of a unix tool, and the results are fairly uniformly awful. Everything looks mostly right, and nothing works quite right. They're often actually more unstable than native Windows apps, probably because the porters don't know half as many of the landmines littering the windoze APIs as real Windows application programmers do (and *they* only know maybe half of the total, to judge by the stability of even higher-quality Windows apps) and because they are bolting on a thin layer of Windows widgets onto a core that works in ways fundamentally alien to those same APIs. No real Windows app dares to try spawning around 700 threads to service a request to copy two lines of text to the clipboard, for example. :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
