26 Jul
2005
26 Jul
'05
9:07 a.m.
On Tue, 26 Jul, 2005 at 10:36AM +0100, tim hall spake thus:
Last Monday 25 July 2005 22:15, Kevin Cosgrove was
like:
must...resist..trying....to...convert...
Gah, sod it. Here goes:
Emacs might be awkward at first. Just like walking might be awkward
when you're used to crawling. That doesn't justify going to work on
your hands and knees.
People get past the learning curve and use Emacs because once they do,
they find that they can do things more quickly and easily than they
can in anything else. Some things are just impossible to do in
Windows-like editors without a lot of hard work - replace-regexp is my
favourite example, and has saved me hours of work. Add to that the
syntax highlighting, indentation awareness, cooperation with make,
latex, javac, whatever, region comment/uncomment, etc., etc., and you
will begin to see why learning Emacs is worth it.
Vi people will say the same kind of things about Vi, but of course,
they only like Vi because they haven't got used to Emacs yet.
And there is one more thing that I love about Emacs that will probably
be seen as a problem by others: I don't know all of it. That's right,
I enjoy my ignorance. I learn new things all the time, and my
"editing experience" is enriched. Please excuse that lapse into
marketing speak.
Notice I have stayed away from calling Emacs the One True Editor.
This isn't because it's not, but because that kind of talk tends to
scare people away.
Emacs is the only religion I need.
On 25 July 2005 at 15:46, Ben Loftis
<ben(a)glw.com> wrote:
Thanks Kevin. All keybindings have to be learned. I can't use vi without
constant reference to the manual. I dare say the same would be true of emacs.
I dislike them both and use nedit for everything, simply because it works
much more like a Windows based editor, so I had to relearn less in order to
get typing when I first migrated. It's nothing to do with intuitabilty either
- old habits die hard. Most professional audio gear is like a bicycle.
A bike is
certainly not intuitive to a first time user, but once you
learn how to balance, steer, etc, you can get around faster
than someone on foot. This has sometimes been described as
"intuitable" rather than intuitive.
Or, "discoverable" versus "usable".
Word is easy to discover for easy things to do. 'vi' is
*much* faster, if my 'vi' speed versus the 'Word' speed of my
compatriots is any gauge. Pull-down menus are "intuitive", where
as hot-keys are not. But, hot-keys get the work done quickly
once they're known. Pull-down menus which list their hot-key
shortcuts in the menu are quite nice for me. The Opera web
browser is one example of this. cheers,
tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk
--
"I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated
Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you."
(By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)