[Gllug] [OTish] The greatest test ever

[Nix]

[wrapped to 72 chars]
On Tue, 07 Jan 2003, Branden Faulls uttered the following:
>                                                            I had
> always wondered why the hell Emacs was so extensible, and yet had such
> awkward command sequences.

The command sequences are meant to be a mixture of mnemonic and
typeable. It's questionable whether they succeeded. The general idea
was that important commands that were frequently needed would be at
most one chord away.

Some of the mnemonics have distinctly faded with the years (C-x x and
C-x g, for instance, are named after specific TECO macros, which was
useful if you were migrating to Emacs from TECO, but not otherwise...)

The division into `more' and `less' often needed was not exactly ideal,
either; IMNSHO saving is common enough that C-x C-s should have been on
one key, while e.g. quoted-insert or mark-beginning-of-buffer is rare
enough that it should be underneath C-x...

>                             I had just started getting used to my
> gimpy, twisted C-x C-s,

C-x -> {less-often-needed editing functions}, C-s -> {save}. Not that
twisted; certainly no twistier than :w.

>                         Alt-TAB, C-r

lisp-complete-symbol followed by reverse isearch?!

(Ah, maybe your window manager intercepts M-TAB. How annoying.)

>                                      everytime I wanted to check some
> Web work I was doing.  I looked like Jerry Lee Lewis playing "Goodness
> Gracious Great Flaming Text Editor Wars".

The register and rectangle commands are where it starts getting really
fun; many of them are on key sequences two keys deep.

Almost the first thing I learnt to do in Emacs was to teach it how to
get at some more bucky bits (I have meta, alt, super and hyper all
bound), so I had many more keys within easy reach of some chord or
other...

-- 
`I knew that there had to be aliens somewhere in the universe.  What I
 did not know until now was that they read USENET.' --- Mark Hughes,
      on those who unaccountably fail to like _A Fire Upon The Deep_

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