[Sussex] A beginner's guide to GNU/Linux

[Geoff Teale]

On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 19:07 +0000, Paul Tansom wrote:
> Absolutely, I just wish they'd add the keybindings to Word - actually I
> don't because I can't remember the last time I used Word, but I do find
> myself wanting to use them in OOo and on web page forms. The number of
> times I end up with odd characters in my text as I try to move around
> the document. I've always been a bit of a text mode type though and
> had a liking for strange codes in the text - I used to love Protext on
> my old 8 and 16 bit computers :)
> 

My solution to this problem is do everything in emacs - then you only
need to know the one set of key bindings :-)

> Doesn't feel arcane to me, Emacs does... 

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that one was more arcane than the other.
They're both oddities to most users raised on notepad.  My personal
feeling is that emacs is slightly more intuitive to new users than vi
(but I recognise that might be a minority view).

> it all comes down to
> familarity. 

Exactly.

> Windows feels arcane to me, or perhaps childish would be a
> better term - very limited and not at all useful for the power user,
> very slow to do anything useful. By 2012 maybe it will have caught up
> with Linux in the usability stakes ;)

I find it very hard to achieve anything when I have to use Windows these
days - fortunately that's a very rare event.

One of the great successes of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
distribution is that it managed to achieve the same effect on Linux.
Nice.  :-)

-- 
Geoff Teale
Software Engineering Team Leader

Cmed Group Ltd.
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