Christian Gollwitzer wrote: > Am 23.08.14 11:08, schrieb Steven D'Aprano: >> This is the moment that I decide to give up on Emacs and take up >> something trivial in comparison, like being a Soyuz pilot, если вы >> знаете, что я имею в виду. > > Well done, Steve! This is the exact reason that I do not recommend gvim > to anybody, who asks me an editor question, though I use it myself for > practically any text editing task. (I'm pretty sure you did that C-f > ... thing on purpose to make your point clear. and that you actually > understand it was meant to represent pressing Ctrl-key).
Of course I did, but only because I've been a Linux user and programmer for about 15 years now. Except for Emacs, the rest of the world says Ctrl-F (or Command-F if you have a Mac), and use it to mean Find. Emacs is a universe of its own, but you can hardly be a Linux programmer without coming across Emacs terminology enough to at least recognise it. > There are ways to put these editors into Beginner's mode, for vim there > is "evim", and for sure emacs has something similar, where the editor > behaves more like you expect. In evim, this means you can't go to > command mode, and you need to use the menus and toolbars to save/load > text. But if you do that, you also loose the functionality that comes > from the command mode - it's actually better to recommend Notepad++ or > kate. Despite my comments, I don't actually have any objection to people who choose to use Emacs, or Vim, or edit their text files by poking the hard drive platter with a magnetised needle if they prefer :-) But I do think it's silly of them to claim that Emacs has no learning curve, or to fail to recognise how unfamiliar and different the UIs are compared to nearly everything else a computer user is likely to be familiar with in 2014. I'm especially annoyed and/or amused by the tendency of many people to assume that there are only three editors: Emacs, Vim (one of which is used by all right-thinking people, the other being sent by the Devil to tempt us from righteousness) and Notepad (which is used only by the most primitive, deprived savages who are barely capable of bashing out "Hello World" using one finger). Besides, ed is the one true editor *wink* My own feeling is that Emacs and/or Vim very likely are extraordinarily powerful, and for those who want to take the time and effort to become proficient they can probably solve certain editing tasks more quickly than I can. But that's okay: I suspect that they're optimizing for the wrong things, or at least things for which I personally have no interest in optimizing: while they can probably replace the third letter of every second word in all sentences beginning with W ten times faster than I can, that's hardly a bottleneck in my world. I've watched touch-typing Vim users, and they can pound the keys much faster than me, but that seems to mean that they just make mistakes faster than me. (Possibly unfair, since everyone probably loses accuracy when being watched. But still, it's the only data I have.) When I'm programming, actual fingers on keys is just a small proportion of the time spent. Most of my time is reading, thinking and planning, with typing and editing a distant fourth, and I not only don't mind moving off the keyboard onto the mouse, but actually think that's a good thing to shift my hands off the keyboard and use a different set of muscles. So I'm not especially receptive to arguments that Vim or Emacs will make me more productive. But, to each their own. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
