[Gllug] ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

[Steve Kemp]

On Wed May 13, 2009 at 11:01:32 -0400, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:

> In the most basic case the mouse is a much faster interface for
> highlighting chunks of text that are more than a few lines away from the
> cursor, or more than a dozen characters into a line.

  Standalone you might be right; but if you consider removing  hand
 from the keyboard, finding the mouse, using it, then moving back to
 the keyboard to operate on the selection I think you're mistaken.

> Anyway, what's wrong with having and interface you can SEE? If a menu
> bar takes up a significant portion of your screen then you must be using
> a pretty low rez screen so it can't be that, and surely not having to
> keep every obscure command in your head or resort to man pages every
> time you need to do something obscure is a boon right?

  Indeed having options be discoverable is useful.  But after using
 Emacs for many many years now I don't think about things - I just
 move my fingers by magic.   I don't pause to remember "obscure"
 commands - I just use them.  Muscle memory is a powerful thing.

  If I wanted to I could use the menus, but I think 99% of the time
 I just turn them off as a distraction.    (If I'm introducing
 somebody to Emacs I'll point them at the built-in tutorial and
 tell them to use the menus if they get lost.)

> I mean I can
> understand why people NEED terminal based editors, just not why they
> would CHOOSE them when they have to option to use a GUI editor... 

  Mostly the graphical editors just aren't as powerful as the ones
 that traditionally have been terminal ones.

  E.g. Many applications have built in support for regular expression
 based search and replace these days - but very few allow incremental
 search, or true macros.  (By which I mean the emacs idea of
 start-kbd-macro, execute-kbd-macro)


> it's
> not like they even work significantly differently: they have keyboard
> short cuts just like terminal apps (except I can define my own and
> change their behaviour in about a second rather than by having to edit a
> config file) and GUI editor have the advantage of mice, menus, scroll
> bars, context menus, non-modal search and replace dialogues, prettier
> font rendering etc.

  If that were all there was to it you'd probably have fewer people
 disagreeing.

  The fact is that Emacs has more built in "primitives" than any
 other editor has available within its menus - it simply does more.
 Partly because that is how it is designed, but also because there are
 a million and one extensions you can load.


  For example does your editor have a menu checkbox for 
 "Make file executable when saving if it has a shebang line pointing 
 to a valid executable and you've just created a file?"  - Emacs does.

 (My ~/.emacs/ directory has hundreds of extensions I load every
 day.  For example "M-x uptime" shows me that my current editor has
 been loaded for "3 days(s) 12:03".)

> This reminds me of the old rock and rollers arguing which of the
> Beatles, The Stones or The Who were the best while dismissing any music
> made since the 70s as "all just thump, thump, thump" ;D

  People are unlikely to covert others - most of this stuff is
 experience and personal preference.  Hence the term "Holy Wars".

Steve
-- 
Managed Anti-Spam Service
http://mail-scanning.com/

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug