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

[Nix]

On 13 May 2009, general uttered the following:
> 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.

If those chunks are entirely random selections of text, you may be
right.  But in the more common case when you're trying to select, say, a
paragraph or an expression or fourteen words or something like that,
Emacs has cursor-motion commands that can hop from one end to the other
instantly: incremental search for one end, drop the mark, hop to the
other, bingo: total of about five keystrokes. *Far* faster than
the major muscle movements required to grab the mouse.

>                                                      In the more
> complex, more productive case would you care to explain to me how I
> would make better use of time saving GUI design tools such as Glade with
> a keyboard?

GUI design is a bit of a special case, although even there professional
GUIs should generally be defining constraints into which their UIs can
fit rather than falling into the sinful ways of pixel-accurate
positioning (which work great until someone turns up with a screen at a
different resolution than you expected).

> Anyway, what's wrong with having and interface you can SEE?

Nothing. Emacs and vi both have those in GUI mode (which is the default
for Emacs if X is running). Emacs even has a option-setting thingy
(customize) although it keeps rotting because no real emacs users use it
very much.

> keep every obscure command in your head or resort to man pages every
> time you need to do something obscure is a boon right?

Nobody could ever keep all of Emacs in their head, or even most of it,
although the core stuff does rapidly land in muscle memory. That's why
Emacs's help system is two keystrokes away at all times (*all* times, no
stupid modal dialogs that don't let you get at help until you close
them, *ever*). Look particularly at C-h k ('describe-key'), C-h c
('describe-key-briefly'), C-h b ('describe-bindings', showing you *all*
keys active in this buffer), C-h a (which shows you everything with a
name matching a given regex).

Some of these are described in the damn *tutorial*, which is the very
first thing a new Emacs user is hit with. You really are criticising
systems you know nothing at all about, aren't you?

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

Well, Emacs is both (as is XEmacs, the flavour I happen to use). If I
have X running, which is usually, then it comes up graphical with menu
bars and colours and so on. If I'm working over a dog-slow narrowband
modem from my parents' house, it comes up in text mode. The *same
instance* comes up in text mode, actually, so all the stuff I was
working on at home is still there. (It just has one window open on my
X display and another 'window' open on a tty.)

> 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)

This has been true of Emacs since 1976, and is probably true of vi as
well (I'm not a vi person so wouldn't know). It's *interactive*,
i.e. you don't have to edit files just to change configuration.

>             and GUI editor have the advantage of mice, menus, scroll
> bars, context menus, non-modal search and replace dialogues, prettier
> font rendering etc.

All of which exist in modern Emacsen, although the menus, scroll bars
and context menus are hardly ever used by anyone who's been using the
editor more than a few months. Serach and replace 'dialogues' will seem
utterly crude after you've seen isearch (which Emacs invented many many
years ago). (Font rendering it used to be crap at but has recently
become much better.)

All these things you're saying are so great, we've been *doing* for
*decades*.

> 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

Actually I'm just depressed that there's been so little progress that
people are decrying older editors for being incapable when in many ways
they are *more* capable than the later editors, because the later
editors spent all their damn time reinventing wheels and trying to fit
into godawful GUI paradigms which were not designed for large-scale text
editing work. (CUA, I'm looking at you.)
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